North and South: The North and South Trilogy (35 page)

At least he would be in Lehigh Station tomorrow. He planned to stop overnight at the Haverford House, where the Hazards always stayed in Philadelphia. In the morning he would catch the local and, once home, begin the delicate job of preparing his family for his marriage to a Catholic.

The memory of Priam returned. It led to thoughts of his relationship with Orry—and, by extension, Orry’s family. George could find something to like about every one of them, even feckless Cousin Charles, but that liking generated a familiar confusion and a good deal of guilt. By a combination of circumstances and choice, the Mains were deeply involved in Negro slavery.

The train slowed, chugging past shanties and dilapidated buildings before it pulled into the station. The roof over the platforms shut out most of the daylight. Instead of snowflakes, sparks from the engine swirled past the window. Passengers rose, gathering their belongings. Their reflections shimmered in the sooty glass. But George saw Priam.

Slavery had to end. His stop in South Carolina had convinced him. The goal wouldn’t be easily reached. Too many obstacles stood in the way. Tradition. Pride. Economic dependence on the system. The disproportionately large influence of the small number of families who owned most of the slaves. Even the Bible. Just before George had left the plantation, Tillet had quoted Scripture to justify sending a patrol after Priam. The runaway had clearly disobeyed the charge in the third chapter of Colossians: “Servants, obey in all things your master…”

Dismantling the peculiar institution would require flexibility, good will, and, most of all, determination to see it done. George saw none of those things at Mont Royal.

He turned the problem the other way around for a moment, considering his friendship with Orry as something that had to be preserved. There, too, serious difficulties loomed. When he had pleaded for Priam’s freedom, Orry’s warning had been clear. He mustn’t interfere again if he expected the friendship to continue.

Yet how strong was friendship? Could it banish disagreement over a fundamental issue of human liberty—as if the issue and the disagreement didn’t exist? Could friendship even survive in an atmosphere of growing sectional tension?

Orry said it would—if the slavery issue was ignored. But old Calhoun, sick and embittered, had indirectly suggested that it could not when he declared that separation was the sole remaining answer.

If a solution was to be found, George believed the burden for finding it rested largely on people such as the Mains. If the South was not solely responsible for creating the problem, the South had preserved it and the South must take steps to solve it. George held the North blameless and free of responsibility in the whole matter. At least that was his opinion as he trudged up the platform with his valise.

Fortunately the Haverford House was able to accommodate him without a reservation. He was signing the ledger when the unctuous clerk began, “I believe we have another guest from—”

“George, is that you?”

The voice behind him overlapped the clerk’s. “—your family.” He turned, then grinned at the young woman hurrying toward him, diamonds of melted snow shining on her muff and the fur trim of her hat.

“Virgilia. Good Lord. I didn’t expect to see you.”

She was flushed with excitement, and for a moment her squarish face looked almost pretty. In his absence her waist had grown thicker, he noticed.

“I booked a room because I’m staying in the city tonight,” she said in a breathless way.

“By yourself? Whatever for?”

“I’m giving my first address at a public meeting sponsored by the society.”

He shook his head. “I’m lost. What society?”

“The anti-slavery society, of course. Oh, George, I’m so nervous—I’ve spent weeks writing and memorizing the speech.” She caught his hands in hers; how cold and hard her fingers felt. Almost like a man’s. “I completely forgot you were due back today or tomorrow. You must come and hear me! All the tickets were gone weeks ago, but I’m sure we can squeeze you into a box.”

“I’ll be happy to come. I’m not going home till morning.”

“Oh, that’s glorious. Do you want to eat first? I can’t, I’m too wrought-up. George, I’ve finally found a cause to which I can devote all my energy.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said as they walked to the staircase behind the hotel porter who had picked up George’s luggage.
You found a cause because you couldn’t find a beau.

Silently he chastised himself for the unkindness. He and Virgilia had never been close, but she was still his sister. He was tired and perhaps a little put off by her enthusiasm.

“It’s a very worthy cause, too, though I doubt Orry Main would think so. Honestly, I don’t know how you can associate with such people.”

“Orry’s my friend. Let’s leave him out of our discussions, shall we?”

“But that’s impossible. He owns Negro slaves.”

George held back a harsh retort and thought about begging off for the rest of the evening. Later he wished he had.

The hall held about two thousand people. Every seat was filled. Men and women were standing in the side aisles and at the rear. There were children present and a few well-dressed blacks. Lamps throughout the hall shed a smoky, sulfurous light.

George was squeezed into a chair at the back of the second-tier box at stage right. Three men and three women sat in front of him, all in formal attire. When he introduced himself, their greeting was brief and reserved. He suspected they were members of Philadelphia society.

Although it was quite cold outside—the temperature had plummeted while he was eating dinner—the press of human bodies in heavy clothing made the auditorium hot and put a sheen of sweat on every face. Even before the start of the formal program the audience was in a frenzy, stomping and clapping during the singing of several hymns.

George squinted at the handbill given him when he entered the box. He sighed. The program was divided into nine sections. A long evening.

Loud applause greeted the half-dozen speakers when they appeared from the wings. Virgilia looked poised and calm as she walked to the row of chairs set in front of a vivid red velvet drop. She took the third chair from the left and looked up at her brother. He nodded and smiled. The chairman, a Methodist clergyman, approached the podium and rapped the gavel for order. The program opened with a singing group, the Hutchinson Family of New Hampshire. They were received with loud applause as they took their positions to the right of the podium.

Hutchinson Senior introduced the group as “members of the tribe of Jesse and friends of equal rights.” This produced more cheering, clapping, and stomping. The group was apparently well known in anti-slavery circles, though George had never heard of them. He was surprised and a bit dismayed by the fervor of the audience. He hadn’t realized Pennsylvania abolitionists could be so emotional. It added to his understanding of the issue responsible for this gathering.

The Hutchinsons sang five songs. A piano and cello accompanied them from the pit. Their last number was a stirring anthem, that concluded:

          
“Ho, the car emancipation

          
Rides majestic through the nation.

          
Bearing on its train the story—

          
Liberty, our nation’s glory!

          
Roll it along—roll it along

          
Through the nation

          
Freedom’s car—Emancipation!”

Men and women leaped to their feet, applauding. The enthusiastic audience held the Hutchinsons onstage and kept them bowing for more than three minutes. Virgilia’s cheeks looked bright and moist as she smiled up at the box again.

The first address, ten minutes, was delivered by another clergyman, this one from New York City. He explained and endorsed the anti-slavery position of the noted Unitarian divine, William Ellery Channing of Boston. According to Channing, slavery could best be overcome by a direct and continuing appeal to the Christian principles of the slave owners. It was a conclusion not unlike the one George had reached on the train. Tonight he put the theory alongside a mental portrait of Tillet Main and got a shock. He knew Channing’s plan would never work.

It wasn’t popular with the audience, either. The cleric sat down to just a spattering of applause.

The second speaker received a much bigger hand. He was a tall, grizzled black man introduced as Daniel Phelps, a former slave who had escaped across the Ohio River and now devoted himself to lecturing about his days of bondage in Kentucky. Phelps was an effective orator. His fourteen-minute address, whether true in every detail or not, wrung the last drop of emotion from the audience. His gruesome anecdotes of beatings and torture carried out by his owner brought men to their feet with howls of rage. When Phelps finished, he received a standing ovation.

Virgilia fidgeted with a handkerchief while the chairman introduced her. He put extra emphasis on her last name. Murmurs in the hall showed that some had recognized the name of the well-known family of ironmasters. One of the women in the box turned to give George a quick reappraisal. He felt better, less of a nonentity.

Virgilia continued to display nervousness as she walked to the podium. The poor girl really was too buxom, George thought; unattractive, almost. But perhaps some man would be taken with her intelligence. For her sake, he hoped so.

At first Virgilia spoke hesitantly, offering the audience nothing more than a standard denunciation of slavery. But four or five minutes into her address, the direction of it changed. The audience’s nervous foot shuffling stopped, and from the first row to the highest perch in the gallery, every eye was fixed on her.

“I am loath to speak of such things with members of the fair sex and small children present. But it has been said that truth is not and never can be impure. So we must not shrink from examining every facet of the South’s peculiar institution, no matter how distasteful—no matter how immoral.”

The hall was hushed. The audience sensed that Virgilia was skillfully blending wrath with titillation. The men and women in front of George strained forward to hear. He gazed out across the crowd, unsettled by the sight of so many sweaty faces bearing expressions of righteous zeal. What unsettled him most was his own sister. She gripped the sides of the podium and lost all her hesitancy, and even some of her coherence, as she went on:

“Whatever civility, whatever pretenses of refinement exist in the South—these are built upon a rotten foundation. A foundation which flouts the most fundamental laws of man and God. The South’s hateful system of free labor depends upon the perpetuation of its free labor
force.
And where do new laborers come from when older ones drop by the wayside, exhausted by cruel toil or killed by repressive discipline? The new laborers come from those very same plantations. For their true crop is a human crop.”

A shiver and a thrilled sigh swept through the hall as the audience realized what she meant. One woman rose in the gallery and dragged her small daughter toward the exit. Many around her scowled and hissed for silence.

“The plantations of the South are nothing less than black breeding farms. Gigantic bordellos, sanctioned, maintained, and perpetuated by a degenerate aristocracy which rides roughshod over the Christian beliefs of the few—the very few—Southern yeomen whose voices cry out in faint futile protest against these crazed satyrs—this godless immorality!”

Degenerate aristocrats? Crazed satyrs? Black breeding farms? George sat dry-mouthed, unable to believe what he was hearing. Virgilia tarred all Southerners with the same brush, but her accusations simply didn’t apply to the Mains. Not unless he was an imbecile and had been deliberately hoodwinked at Mont Royal. There were a great many evils in the peculiar institution, but he had seen no evidence of the one Virgilia described.

What horrified him most was the crowd’s reaction. They believed every word. They wanted to believe. Like a good actress, Virgilia sensed this eagerness flowing like a current across the footlight candles, and she responded to it. She glided out from behind the podium to let them see more of her. Let them see her righteous frenzy, her flaming glance and trembling hands, clenched white in wrath, which she brought to her breasts.

“The very stones cry out against such wickedness. Every upright human heart proclaims in moral outrage—no. No!
No!”
She flung her head back and struck her bosom each time she uttered the word. A man in the gallery picked up the chant. Soon the whole hall rang with it:

“No! No! NO! NO!”

Gradually the tumult subsided. Virgilia reached to the podium for support. Her breasts rose and fell. Patches of sweat showed on her clothing as she struggled to remember her place in the text. Short of breath, she rushed on to her conclusion, but George paid little attention to the words. He was appalled by her wild statements—and the crowd’s instantaneous acceptance of them.

Clearly his sister had found an outlet for long-submerged emotions. There was something indecent about watching her display them before hundreds of observers. Her language was sexual, her style almost orgiastic, as she proclaimed that morality demanded action against black breeding farms:

“They must be burned. Destroyed. Obliterated! And their owners with them!”

He jumped up and left the box, overturning his chair in his haste. He ran down flights of stairs, desperately eager for a breath of cold, pure air. As he reached the main floor, he sensed the auditorium walls shaking from the clapping and foot pounding that greeted the end of the speech. From the rear he looked inside.

The entire audience was on its feet. Onstage, Virgilia stood with her head thrown back. Her exertions had loosened her hair and disarrayed her clothing, but she was unconcerned. Her face shone with a dreamy exaltation, with fulfillment. He turned away, sickened.

Once outside, he gulped air and relished the falling snow. He would have to tell her she had spoken effectively, of course. But he also intended to take issue with her unfounded generalizations.