The Invisible Line (35 page)

Gibson had not planned to spend November 1892 in Arkansas, but his doctors had told him that his heart and kidneys were failing. After summering in Westchester and stopping briefly back in Washington, he had gone to New Orleans to campaign for Grover Cleveland's bid to unseat Benjamin Harrison and win a second term as president. But Gibson could barely leave his room at the St. Charles Hotel. Although he had for years described how the journey home would leave him “flat of my back,” his city friends were aghast at the man they saw—gray hair, gray skin, in panting agony with every slow step. Before Gibson could vote in the election—before he could toast the Democrats' reconquest of the White House—his doctors ordered him to leave New Orleans immediately before the damp of early winter killed him. He wrote out a codicil to his will and canceled an order of horses and cattle for his property in Terrebonne Parish. He met with his law partner Gilbert Hall in the lobby of the St. Charles, told him about the diagnosis, and said that he dreamed of the day he could retire to his sugar plantation, his “old family mansion, full of rich and comfortable furniture, with a library which he had been gathering for years.” Then he boarded a train to points north and west—to Jackson, Memphis, Little Rock, and finally Hot Springs.
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Gibson did not know if he would ever see Louisiana again or, for that matter, if Louisiana would even notice that he was gone. During eight years in the House of Representatives and another ten in the Senate, Gibson had channeled millions of dollars to his state: creating federal offices and agencies in New Orleans, committing the government once and for all to building and maintaining Mississippi River levees, fighting to preserve the tariffs that shielded the sugar plantations from competition in Hawaii and the rest of the world. In Terrebonne Parish, the town that was closest to his father's plantations—Tigerville—had changed its name to Gibson in his honor. But the Louisiana that he had seen on several visits in 1892 barely appreciated what he had accomplished for it, let alone what he aspired for its future.
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Perhaps the culture of politics in Louisiana—what Gibson called the “pepper + salt atmosphere,” the petty jealousies, the “flatterers + schemers + political wreckers,” the cash exchanging hands—made it impossible for any elected official to feel loved. Gibson's votes in Congress, the positions he took in local politics, and the patronage appointments he secured seemed to create loyalty and loathing in equal measure. For everyone who benefited from his work, others—from scattered individuals to entire factions of the Democratic Party—felt shut out. Gibson earned their undying enmity, the declaration of a “relentless war” in which he was routinely accused of corruption. People he had worked with in 1877 to end Reconstruction now minimized his contribution. “I have received any number of letters,” Gibson wrote, “some threatening my life + others warning me of assassination.”
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When Gibson's positions did not inspire hatred, they were simply alien to what life in Louisiana had become. As Louisiana's Democrats consolidated their rule after Reconstruction, the structure of state government was molded around three goals: keeping power, enriching the powerful, and maintaining white supremacy. Reconstruction-era policies that benefited whites and blacks alike, such as public education, were scrapped. More white Louisianans were illiterate in 1892 than when Gibson first took office. When Gibson voted in the Senate for federal education funds to be equally divided between blacks and whites, for a modern civil service to replace patronage, and for direct election of senators, it was hard to know what constituency in Louisiana he represented. He was spending more time in Washington, in Westchester, on the New England shore, and in European spas than in New Orleans. In the spring of 1892, as Gibson stood for reelection to another term in the Senate, he faced a strong slate of challengers. The legislature deadlocked and decided to postpone the vote. Gibson was denounced as the senator from New York.
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In Washington Gibson was among friends, but there too he was alone, left to hobble around an empty home. His wife, Mary, only forty-one, died in 1887. She had been sick for two years, but the end was sudden. Their three boys were gone, sent away to boarding school and college. The youngest, Preston, now spent days worrying about his father's health, wishing in vain for a letter from him. “I sincerely hope that you will allow me to come home Easter,” the twelve-year-old wrote in 1892. “Please write and tell me so if I have good marks and am a good boy I can go and I will be a good boy if I have to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning to study.”
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Gibson was surrounded by admirers in Washington, but the politics of North and South remained an embarrassment to him. In 1888, more than a decade after the compromise that had ended Reconstruction, Gibson was elected to a second term in the Senate. The Republican majority held up his credentials and threatened a meticulous investigation into electionrelated violence and fraud in Louisiana. For nearly a year Gibson sat through speeches detailing his state's failings: ballot-box stuffing, homes of blacks and sympathetic whites riddled with bullets or burned to the ground, and the weekly “political murders of negroes,” by noose and shotgun blast and throats cut ear to ear.
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Worst of all were the allegations of “terrorism attempted in Terre Bonne Parish,” which included multiple references to violence instigated by Randall's younger brother Tobe, now an attorney living on a family plantation. Tobe reportedly had said that he was leading mobs of night riders to help his brother win reelection to the Senate. After years of floating above the nastiness and corruption, Gibson was mired in the moral swamp of Louisiana politics. The Republicans were forcing upon him a hard realization: that he directly benefited from Louisiana's political terrorists and was no different from them.
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As he had in years past, Gibson assured his fellow senators that white Southerners shared the same values as Northerners. “The great body of the population reposes solidly upon those sentiments of religion and charity,” he declared, “of good-will and patriotic endeavor, that constitute the basis upon which the structure of every enlightened government must rest.” The South, according to Gibson, was “rallying around the great central ideas of constitutional government, building railroads, starting furnaces, building up great institutions of learning ... reducing governmental expenses, inviting foreign immigration and immigration from our countrymen in the North.” He said that blacks and whites “live in relations of kindness and amity so far as I know everywhere in the State of Louisiana” and that Louisiana's Democrats aimed only to “obliterate the color line in politics and consolidate the people on the basis of equal rights and common interests.” Finally, Gibson reminded the Senate that blacks were “a race marked as distinct from the white race, and which has not yet the capacity because perhaps it has not had the opportunity to fit itself for the responsibilities of self-government.” Most white Northerners agreed, and Gibson sounded eminently reasonable in urging patience as “the experiment of universal suffrage in the South” would yield equality in time.
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Such words had been seductive in 1877, but throughout 1888 and into 1889 Senate Republicans kept up the drumbeat of accusations of atrocities and irregularities. Gibson shifted his response, attacking the Republicans' evidence as unreliable. The allegations concerning his brother, he said, were made by “a single man in the parish, of whom I never heard, and I doubt if the man ever lived there.” New Hampshire senator William Chandler promptly produced a letter from a Terrebonne Parish newspaper editor suggesting that Gibson knew the man well and accused the senator of “untruth, in whole and in every part.”
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Again, Gibson changed tactics. “I did not know, until informed by the Senator from New Hampshire, that I had an enemy in my old parish or that there was any person in it who would characterize any statement I might make as untrue,” he said. “Nor did I believe there was a Senator in this body who would so far forget decorum and good manners, which always mark the relations of gentlemen and which we have the right to expect from American Senators, as to read a letter, with the view to wound the sensibilities of an associate, from one of his political correspondents.”
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Gibson turned the issue of racial violence and fair elections into broad questions of senatorial etiquette and, ultimately, federalism: how much courtesy and deference senators owed to one another and whether the Senate should regulate its own membership by investigating a state's internal affairs. A dozen years after the 1877 compromise, Gibson, with a lawyer's skill, could still turn unacceptable facts into palatable abstract principles. At the same time he personalized the matter. Senator Chandler's accusations had hurt his feelings. Gibson himself hardly ever went to Terrebonne Parish, and to his mind, the blacks there had trampled on his rights. He described the plantation that he still owned. “For many years past, with the exception of the main house and yard, the entire property has been in the possession and use of the former negro slaves ... without paying a sou of rent or of the taxes,” Gibson told his colleagues. “So much for my contribution to the reign of terror in Terre Bonne Parish; so much for my oppression and denial of rights and privileges to my former negro slaves.” Without ever responding directly to the charges of political terror, Gibson had found the vulnerabilities in the Republican position and declared himself a victim, not a victimizer. For Republicans and Democrats alike, the relationships that senators had with one another, the personal dynamics that kept their small community running, mattered more than the workings of democracy in Louisiana.
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Gibson was quickly seated in the new Senate, but the effort had exhausted him. He had spent fifteen years selling the idea that the New South's leaders and their values were indistinguishable from those of the North, that together they formed a single national elite. He had put himself forward as a leader whom Northerners could trust and accept as one of their own. Now he knew that he would always be different, always suspect, always tainted. Gibson wore the South—its sickening past, its vicious present—like an indelible mark on his skin.

 

 

IN THE WOODS RINGING Hot Springs, the chill air of late fall was heavily perfumed. The smell mingled different notes: tree bark and mud, pine needles green on the branch and decaying on the forest floor, resin oozing down limbs and dripping off branches. It was thick, inescapable, almost tarry as a person inhaled, but somehow it lightened the air, creating an illusion of purity, like the smell of salt and seaweed by the shore.
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Randall Gibson sat in an open carriage bumping and flickering through the shadows. Sitting next to him was a man in a well-cut suit, stark bald with a full white beard, tall and wiry, eyes undimmed. William Preston Johnston had accompanied Gibson from New Orleans. Over several days they had been taking walks around the resort and rides through the hills together.
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On their way back to the luxurious Park Hotel, which styled itself as Hot Springs's “palace of purification,” Gibson and Johnston passed through town. Even in the short days leading to winter, Hot Springs had, according to the writer Stephen Crane, “the same quality as the gaiety of the Atlantic Coast resorts in the dead of summer.” The resort could have been anywhere. The tidy paved streets, Crane wrote, “mingled an accent from the South, a hat and pair of boots from the West, a hurry and important engagement from the North, and a fine gown from the East.”
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In many ways it was the South Gibson had worked to create. It was uncurious, “purely cosmopolitan,” with its local accent—its local prejudices—erased. As with the Mississippi River levees, the government had helped open Hot Springs for business, diverting mountain streams underground and piping water from the springs into the resort. It was a manufactured town with, Crane wrote, “a wide sympathy, not tender, but tolerant.” It was a place where a visitor “may assure himself that there are men of his kind present.”
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Sitting in his carriage, Gibson needed no such assurance. Few people understood him as well as Will Johnston. They had known each other the entirety of their remarkably similar lives. Johnston was Gibson's age almost exactly. Cousins on their mothers' side, they had been raised among the Kentucky aristocracy, with their fathers frequently absent, down the Mississippi River on business in Louisiana and East Texas. Gibson and Johnston had gone to Yale together, read law at the same time, and become officers in the rebel army. After the war they both had sought solid ground by practicing law. When Gibson established himself in New Orleans, he had asked Johnston to leave Louisville and become his partner. Instead Johnston became a college professor and wrote a mammoth biography of his father, the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston. As Gibson worked in Congress to restore former rebels to power, Johnston was shaping how Southerners and Northerners alike would remember the rebellion.
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In 1883 Gibson finally succeeded in bringing his cousin to New Orleans. Two years earlier Paul Tulane had summoned Gibson to the vast estate where he lived alone in Princeton, New Jersey. The eighty-year-old bachelor offered him control of property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to support education in New Orleans, where Tulane had made millions as a young man in the cotton trade. Gibson's father-in-law had been his best friend. Gibson organized a board to run the Tulane Education Fund, which decided to create a university with Will Johnston as its president.
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