Northfield (2 page)

Jesse wrote a letter to another newspaper, the kind of letter he was mighty good at after ten damned years robbing banks and trains. Wrote that he was nowhere near Rocky Cut on that night, blamed some other fool for the robbery, and called Hobbs Kerry a foul liar. Don’t think no one in Missouri believed Jesse none. All that did was sell newspapers.

Things started getting hot in Missouri, hotter than usual for August. Posses was everywhere, looking for us. I took to the timbers, even if nobody really knew me in that part of the country. Jesse said Pinkertons and laws was all over his ma’s farm down in Kearney. We heard that Clell Miller got arrested over in Kansas, but that turned out to be mung news. Yet we couldn’t help but be edgy.

Frank, he come close to shooting me and Charlie Pitts when we met the boys at Monegaw Springs one last time. “Thought you were a damned Pinker-ton,” Frank said, “and I had a notion to kill you.”

Frank never acted spooked like that, but things changed after Hobbs Kerry got his thirty pieces of silver. Missouri was no place to be, no matter how many friends and family the James boys and the Youngers had. Damned ticklish it had become.

“I think it’s time to go to Minnesota,” Bob said one night along the Crooked River.

“I reckon you’re right,” Jesse agreed.

So I was going home, back to Minnesota, and I’d show all them bastards. I’d come visit Sis and her brother-in-law with my pockets filled with silver and gold, more loot that I’d ever damned dreamed of stealing horses or selling whiskey to red niggers. I’d show my sorry excuse of a ma and pa, always praying for my soul when not cussing me or tanning my backside with Pa’s razor strop, what a successful man I’d become. Show them sons-of-bitches who up and arrested me and sent me to Stillwater for stealing that damned horse. And I’d even show them skeptics, Frank and Jim and Cole, that I was a man who lived up to his word. I’d get them out of Minnesota. I’d make a name for myself.

Only the damnedest thing was I just couldn’t get them hymns being sung on that train at Rocky Cut out of my head. Just kept hearing them over and over again, like a damned nightmare, and I just got this damned feeling, peculiar it was, that somebody indeed had just stepped on my grave.

C
HAPTER
T
WO
A
DELBERT
A
MES

With pencil in hand, I desire to relate to you a certain piece of heaven on earth, a hallowed community that Father fell in love with years ago. After spending far too long in the Hades that is the South, I have come home to this glorious town, which I, too, hold dear.

Father, who had spent thirty years at sea and circumnavigated the globe twice, arrived in North-field in the year that saw the bloody rebellion commence. He and Mother came only to visit my brother John, but here the charm of this village, the majesty of the Cannon River, the wondrous principles upon which John Wesley North founded this blossoming village, all conspired to capture my parents’ hearts.

That Mr. North began this town just twenty and one years ago is hard to cognize. This city strikes me as one that is as old as truth. By old I do not mean it looks as ragged as the war-torn South, or a town of tenements and vagabonds, but rather as a place that has always been here, always beautiful and bucolic. Mr. North espoused Abolition, women’s suffrage, Temperance, and wholesome thinking, and our Lord God shined on this good man, and shined even brighter on a dream destined to become a thriving town. A dam was constructed, followed by sawmills and gristmills, and righteous men and women flocked to his burgeoning metropolis. Today we are blessed with not only the millers and the farmers, but wheelwrights, cobblers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, a tannery, foundry and plow factory, bankers, bakers, hostlers, tailors, grocers, apothecaries, fishermen, and fishers of men. We have a railroad and a fire department.

West lies the Big Woods, as fine a forest as ever cultivated by God’s merciful hand. East stretches an endless prairie. North you shall find Minneapolis (formerly St. Anthony) and St. Paul, and south, Cannon City and Faribault, fine cities all, but Northfield, to me, bests them all. It has become a center for not only business, but one of education. We have St. Olaf’s School, founded a year or so ago, and Carleton College, celebrating its tenth anniversary, plus an outstanding public school. We support a lending library, a Y.M.C.A., Masons and Odd Fellows and the Northfield Improvement Association. Temperance has failed, as a few dram shops and other pests of society have sprouted up, but overall I find my new home virtuous and clean.

Northfield easily won over my heart, nigh as easy as beautiful Blanche Butler did. We have been married six years now, six years that should have been joyous except for our long separations due to my duties in the South, and anxieties from those duties. Now, I am home, living in the house that occupies a full block on Division Street. When I saw the plans in
Harper’s Monthly
, I knew this would be a perfect home for my parents. This home we share together now that I am no longer the prodigal son, a home admired by everyone in town, filled with wonderful furniture and lovely paintings, some from Maine, a few from Europe, but much from the South, liberated by the mighty hand of the Union, and paid for—not stolen— although I will concede that I received bargains. The only decent items ever to come from South Carolina or Mississippi are the furniture, curtains, oils-on-canvas, china, and silver now gracing our home.

Late summer is a beautiful time of year in southern Minnesota. The hills come alive with goldenrod and gentian, although this year has been surprisingly wet. Fertile valleys are filled with oaks and black walnuts, fine corn crops, wild plums and delightful crab apples, and abundant fish and game. Farmers till the black earth and raise cattle.

No longer am I governor, senator, or general, though neighbors and friends still address me as such. I am a partner with my father and brother in Jesse Ames & Sons. The mill rests on the east side of the river, just across Mill Square near the iron bridge, grinding out better than 175 barrels of flour each day, a number that keeps growing. Why, Father’s new process patent flour brought him first prize at this year’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, not bad for an old sea merchant.

A mariner I thought I would become, too, and as a lad in my teens I worked my way up to a mate on Father’s clipper ship, but the oceans did not call me, and, growing up in Maine during those troublesome years, I saw war coming. Thus, I received an appointment to West Point, and, as fate and glory would have it, I was graduated in May of 1861—merely days after those fire-eaters in Charleston fired upon our flag in Fort Sumter, and entered the service of the Union—fighting to preserve our nation and wash away this blight upon the South, indeed, our entire country, that was slavery

I shall not bore you with my service during the War for the Suppression of the Rebellion. The wounds I received, including the ghastly one at First Bull Run, and the medals I earned, the brevets and the commissions, can be attributed to duty. At first, I served in the artillery, but even the best officer finds advancement hard among the ranks of cannon and mortar, so I returned home to Rockland and went on the stump, befriending men with power and soliciting their help until finally receiving a commission as commander of the 10
^th
Maine Infantry. As the commoners in both blue and gray would say, I “saw the elephant” at Gaines’s Mill, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg—oh, the horror of our slaughter and the glory of Union bravery at Mayre’s Heights!—Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Fort Fisher. During those ensanguined times, I had the honor and privilege to command a division in the Army of the James under the watchful eye of Major General Benjamin E Butler. Because of this act of God’s mercy, I had the good fortune to meet General Butler’s beautiful daughter, Blanche, whose hand I would take in matrimony on the 20
^th
of July, 1870. Our paths would not cross till after the rebellion, however, as I would not be humbled by her beauty and grace till General Butler introduced us in Washington City, when he was a representative and I a senator, Republicans the both of us as you can be sure.

The general has been reviled by many in the newspapers, hated by secesh for his actions in Louisiana during the rebellion, but I find him a most honorable man. When the fiend in New Orleans abused the flag under which we served, General Butler ordered him hanged. When that witch of a secessionist dumped a chamber pot on Admiral Farragut, the general issued General Orders Number 28, which declared that any of those harlots who dared disrespect officers and men of the Union would be treated as the unscrupulous ladies of the tenderloin they surely were. I tell you: I would have done nothing differently had I been in the general’s place. Benjamin Butler is no Beast; he is a faithful patriot.

I did as much in South Carolina. I punished those men who dared abuse the laws of our nation, who would still fight for their ignoble cause, who would spit on their amnesty oaths and the rights of the Negro, who would desecrate the uniform of the Federal soldier. Southerners do not have to respect me, but they will respect the office, Army, and nation I represent.

War for me, however, began in earnest after the surrender of General Lee and other Rebels. When I was mustered out a year after Appomattox, I longed to visit Northfield, or settle there, but my services remained in need. I vacationed in Europe before returning to duty in Mississippi in the summer of 1867. Almost a year later, I received an appointment as military governor of that wretched state which gave us such fiends as Jefferson Davis and Van Dorn. Later my jurisdiction would reach into Arkansas.

Southerners called me a carpetbagger, one of Grant’s scoundrels, a thief, but I stole nothing as senator or governor. My aim was to enforce the rights of the recently freed Negro and punish the scoundrels that dared remain unreconstructed. The Negro earned his freedom, and the 14
^th
Amendment guaranteed his rights, though one would find that hard to believe in Mississippi. In 1874, Mississippi elected me governor, and I vowed to reconstruct this miserable land of swamps and myriad biting insects and reptiles into a vision of New England, yet faced obstacles at every turn. Confederates despised me as much as I loathed the carpetbaggers who plundered the land and gave good Northern men a damning reputation. The Negro proved ignorant, some of those as dishonest as the most perfidious carpetbagger. Even my lieutenant governor, a man of color named Davis, proved to be a dolt.

I desired the see those ill-gotten plantations cut into parcels and sold as farms to men, colored or white, who would work them. This, as well as other plans I laid out to rebuild this dreadful place, led to mobism, acts of violence, murder. During the recent elections, the notorious Ku Klux Klan formed guards at the polls, intent on disrupting due process, and that vile Senator Lamar started a dastardly campaign—nay, a new revolution—in the halls of the legislature. My pleas for help from President Grant went in vain, and thus it came as no surprise that after the elections of November 1875, after Democratic victories by the most foul measures— Negroes were threatened, sometimes attacked, at the polls—Mississippi’s hold on me, tenuous as it had always been, was lost forever.

Yet I have never been one to retreat, and, when the villains began speaking of impeachment, I refused to surrender. I fought, as is my nature. Ludicrous charges—that I had incited riots in Vicksburg…that I granted unwarranted pardons…of corruption and malfeasance—led to my facing impeachment.

Northern men can find no justice, and certainly no safety, in this cauldron of secession where the mere sight of Old Glory fuels the white-hot blaze of contumacious passion like coal oil. Southerners care nary one fip for humanity, and had I my way, and General Butler his, all those
frondeurs
who wore butternut and gray would be imprisoned, and those holding high office, or rank, perhaps hanged for their transgressions.

On March 28,1876, Congress cleared my name, yet I knew I must depart the South, leave forever.

I resigned as governor of Mississippi, resigning after winning the fight, refusing to cower to threats, resigning only after my name had been vindicated for the records history might desire. With dismissal of the Articles of Impeachment, I felt, well, liberated.

Those nefarious scoundrels in Jackson and Vicksburg celebrated. I imagine, if I may be so profane, that they cleansed their bowels and kidneys in chamber pots whose bottoms once had been painted with General Butler’s likeness but now bore a resemblance to a certain former Union general from Rockland, Maine, forced into politics after the rebellion.

Let the names Adelbert Ames and Benjamin Butler be as reviled in that land of secession as the name William T. Sherman, for I have no doubt that history will praise my attempts at reconstructing the South, at fighting injustice, while Southerners like Frank Blair of Missouri and Lucius Lamar of Mississippi will find their tarnished names reviled, as will many of my unscrupulous Northern counterparts blinded by greed and ambition.

Freed from my years in Purgatory, I came north, to Minnesota, to Blanche and my parents. I tried to shun my experiences in politics, and in the Army, and think as a businessman, as a husband and father and respectful son.

The cool air is refreshing after breathing the sour odor of stagnant water and fighting that oppressive heat. People here are friendly, loyal, and true, many of whom, as did I, proved their mettle on the battlefields in Virginia and elsewhere against the Rebels. Rice County sent 800—perhaps more—brave men to fight for the preservation of our union, to fight to free the Negro in the Bloody 2
^nd
and other glorious volunteer infantries. Others remained home to put down the Sioux insurrection. Most earned their baptism in savage battle.

Our business prospers. To my tired eyes, the Cannon River is as powerful as the Mississippi, as beautiful as the Congaree, cleansing whereas those former rivers flowed with scorn, contempt, prejudice, and hostility. I gaze upon the hills and vales of Rice County as Adam must have first admired Eden.

Our new life begins, I wrote Blanche shortly before my departure from that most foul of Southern states.

Only…as God is my witness, never in my worst nightmares in Carolina and Mississippi, never could I fathom that the South would follow me to Minnesota, and bring its vile war to my home, to threaten my family and leave the streets of this consecrated city stained with the blood of the innocents.