The Invisible Line (36 page)

From Washington and Westchester, spas in Virginia and European resorts, through arthritis and gout and his wife's death, Gibson spent years in constant correspondence with Will Johnston, Paul Tulane, and Tulane's personal attorney James McConnell. Creating the university required all Gibson's skills as a lawyer and politician. In 1883 the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that income from the Tulane Education Fund's properties was not tax exempt, potentially exposing the fund to pressure from whatever political faction had the power to set the rates. Working around the decision, Gibson pushed the legislature to give the Tulane Education Fund full control over the University of Louisiana's New Orleans campus. Although the board would run the university as a private institution—it would now be the Tulane University of Louisiana—arguably this new hybrid was public and therefore tax exempt. Gibson's enemies fought him on tax status and circulated rumors about mismanagement of the bequest, rumors that frequently reached Tulane himself. Still, in 1886 the Louisiana Supreme Court decided that the university and the fund would be tax exempt. It did not matter how the institution actually functioned; a bare classification, Gibson's legal fiction, saved the school from the poison touch of state politics.
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Beyond his work as the board's chair, Gibson worked closely with Johnston to shape what kind of university Tulane would become. They were creating an institution in their own image. It would be devoted to practical subjects and science, as Paul Tulane had insisted, but also literature, history, and philosophy. Its teachers would be unmarried recent graduates of Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, grounded in the best traditional knowledge and the latest advances, devoted without distraction to educating their charges. Tulane's graduates would be well-rounded people, not “mere cog[s] in the great wheel of society,” as Johnston once said, but adults equipped to make independent critical judgments about themselves and their worlds.
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As Paul Tulane continued to give gifts and promised more at his death, his bequest was becoming Gibson's legacy too. The new university—cosmopolitan, idea-driven—would create a new South, led by a rising generation of people trained to think like Gibson and Johnston. In a nod to modernity—and the possibility of attracting additional large donations—Gibson urged Tulane, above strenuous objections from others, to revise his bequest to serve not just the “young men in the City of New Orleans” but “young persons,” opening up the possibility of educating women. Gibson also suggested that Tulane insert one more word between “young” and “persons”—“white”—in order to “confine [the bequest] to white persons.” After much “consultation and consideration,” Gibson wrote, “he did so finally.” It was just one word, but it meant so much. For Gibson, limiting the gift to whites was arguably the key to making the bequest effective, removing it from the scorched-earth politics of white supremacy. At the same time the limitation insulated him from another round of attacks from his political enemies.
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On the cusp of realizing their vision, Gibson and Johnston had to watch it founder. The crippling of their dream was remarkably quick, in a succession of events worthy of a Charles Dickens novel. When Tulane died in March 1887, his lawyer McConnell searched the Princeton mansion for the will that he had drafted for the old man, a will giving a large final endowment to the university. He found nothing. McConnell searched every safe-deposit box where Tulane could have kept it—nothing. No will was ever found. Tulane's millions were divided among his nieces and nephews. In the Princeton Cemetery, the heirs erected an elaborate monument crowned with a sculpture of their uncle. But the university that carried his name—the university that was supposed to be Gibson's monument—would always be strapped for money. It would never stand at full height.
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THE SOFT SHOCK OF damp cloth, cool air on wet skin, interrupted Gibson's exhausted drift from day to night to day. It gave the man a moment of relief, but the slow tide of pain always rose again. Gibson opened his eyes. The room would never be familiar. He was still at the Park Hotel, just two weeks after fleeing New Orleans for his life. But he recognized the woman leaning over him. His older sister Sarah was taking care of him.

For several days the strolls and carriage rides with Will Johnston had had a tonic effect on the ailing senator. But after collapsing in the baths—from dehydration, perhaps, or heatstroke, or even a heart attack—Gibson could not leave his bed. He could barely tolerate spoonfuls of warm milk. Warned by wire that her brother was failing, Sarah Gibson Humphreys had come down from Kentucky to nurse him back to health.
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Randall's sister had been a widow for almost thirty years. As her brother prospered and advanced in American politics, she suffered through decades of financial and personal hardship—mortgaging and leasing out her land, scrimping and economizing, scheming to grow tobacco and sell timber rights, doing anything to keep her family afloat, to hold on to her Louisiana and Kentucky estates, and ensure that her children would remain the equals of her brothers' children. The challenges were severe in the decades after the war, as the country reeled from financial panic to financial panic. Often she found that she could not conduct routine business or secure loans because she was a woman. Although she had the legal capacity to enter into contracts—most states by the 1870s allowed even married women to conduct business and own property independent of their husbands—the law did not affect day-to-day business customs, which continued to treat women as “being infants in reality as well as in law.”
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For a time Randall and Sarah had jointly owned their father's plantation, Live Oak, an experience that convinced her that Randall was out to take her shares and reduce her to one of his dependents, like a child, or a slave. After years of mistrust Randall and Sarah settled their financial differences in 1883, when Randall traded another plantation and muchneeded cash for his sister's share of Live Oak. Sarah and her family became regular visitors in Washington. Her children married well, and she began to feel a measure of security.
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Still, Sarah found herself arguing repeatedly with her brother about the rights of women in an advanced society. Although their discussions may have swayed Randall to include women in the Tulane bequest, the senator insisted that the status of women was fixed by nature. “I
talked
and
talked
down his foolish ideas of women being infants in reality as well as in law,” Sarah wrote. “He couldn't understand how a woman, a ‘female thing,' a ‘chattel' in the common law could feel the same human necessities, to eat, to sleep, to be clothed and sheltered and get ahead in the world, that he did. He couldn't realize that a woman felt human aspirations and were open to human convictions and that they didn't all propose to give their lives up to replenishing the earth just to please men.” While Randall told her that “the mistake of my life had been that I had always been trying to
do
something, when ... I should have sat down and been simply a lady,” Sarah resolved that “we can't give up if we are
ladies
.”
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In 1888 Sarah helped found the Kentucky Equal Rights Association and began campaigning and writing articles in favor of women's suffrage and legislation to raise the age of consent from twelve to eighteen. In her view, merely amending the law would not give women freedom. Only if women fought for their rights, Sarah thought, would equality follow. By struggling and striving—by embodying freedom and equality—women would prevail. Sarah packed a pistol. In the view of one Kentucky newspaper, she was becoming a skilled orator, good enough to “beat half the members of Congress at stump speaking.”
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At Hot Springs, though, Sarah kept her voice soft as she tended to her brother. Outside his room she sent increasingly hopeless accounts of Randall's health to family and friends—he was “vomiting blood, his body broken out with a terrible rash, his throat and tongue swollen—in short he seems to be on fire,” she wrote. But by his side she was gentle, encouraging. Randall was visibly comforted by her presence. Soon two of Randall's sons joined her. Richie arrived on his own; he was prepping for Yale at Fordham College in New York, near the family home at High Bridge. Young Preston, born while his parents were still mourning the loss of their daughter Louisiana in 1880, was pulled out of boarding school and accompanied to Hot Springs by his mother's sister, Leita Kent. He had been seven when his mother died. He would reach adulthood with a large family fortune but without a parent's love.
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Sarah, Richie, Preston—they would carry Randall's memory and the Gibson name, as would his two surviving brothers. Like Sarah, Tobe shuttled between Louisiana and Kentucky; he had built a successful law practice and helped organize gatherings of Confederate veterans. Hart, who had dodged bankruptcy in the 1870s without ever having to go to work, was conspicuously ensconced in a turreted Gothic castle just on the edge of Lexington, a fixture of the society pages, an active Yale alumnus, and a state university trustee. It was well known in Kentucky that “had it been necessary for [Hart] to exert his talents for a livelihood there is no distinction to which he might not have aspired.” As it was, he was one of Kentucky's “most noted breeders of thoroughbreds.”
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Looking at his two boys, Randall Gibson could not have helped but think of the one who was not at his bedside. Montgomery, his oldest son, was in Lexington, drinking himself stupid. Upon sobering up, he would contemplate how to cash out his share of his father's home in New Orleans and sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish. Although his mother had expressed in her will the hope that “my sons will ever respect and obey their father,” Montgomery was “not a very steady boy,” one newspaper reported, “and, to use a street phrase, keeps his father guessing all the time as to what scrape he will turn up in next.” A year after his mother died, he entered Yale. A generation earlier Randall and Hart Gibson had fascinated their classmates by clothing a striving, middle-class sensibility in the manners of Southern planters. But at Yale Montgomery became a wastrel, or worse. While Randall and Hart had spent much of their college years meticulously accounting for every penny spent, as a freshman Montgomery disappeared with a large check that his father had sent to cover his expenses, turning up several days later in Chicago, the money gambled away. Newspapers gleefully reported sightings of “young Mont,” describing a young man without an overcoat talking to strangers at a rapid clip about his trust fund and the trouble he was causing his father, “evidently not intoxicated, but very plainly . . . excited and flighty.”
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Montgomery's distance, figurative and literal, his idling ways, his incapacity—they made Randall weep on his deathbed. They were a sign of failure, the end of his line. Yet they also revealed a deeper success. Montgomery did not have to approach his father's achievements. He was a person of consequence because he was a Gibson. The newspapers would cover his comings and goings, his highs and lows, however petty. It had taken fewer than thirty years for Randall Gibson to build a successful law practice, marry into great wealth, and vault to the highest level of American politics. Now his children were aristocrats.
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Lying in bed, attended to by Sarah, Richie, Preston, and a retinue of doctors, Randall Gibson spent many of his waking hours reviewing his will. He would be buried in Kentucky, not in Louisiana. The boys would get watches and seals like the ones he had worn every day, and Will Johnston would also get a gold seal, a fitting tribute from a man who had written him hundreds of letters over thirty years. Gibson provided $500 annuities for his three siblings and then added an extra $2,000 gift for Sarah. His sister-in-law Leita Kent would get jewelry, books, diaries, and other personal effects, to keep in the family or dispose of as she saw fit.
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Although his three sons were already rich from their mother's family fortune, Gibson resolved to split nearly the entirety of his estate among them. If Tulane University was expecting something more than the $2,500 Gibson had set aside for the study of Southern history, it would once again be disappointed by a will. The boys would get Randall's homes in Washington and New Orleans as well as Oak Forest Plantation in Terrebonne Parish on the banks of Bayou Black, bordering a colored church on forty acres that he had given a favorite servant. Shortly before he left New Orleans for Hot Springs, Gibson had amended the will to instruct his executors and trustees not to sell the real estate before Preston had reached his majority. The properties were pieces of himself, who he was and what he valued, elegant townhomes and sugar fields and cypress forests. The experience of owning them would bring his boys to maturity as surely as if Gibson himself were at their side, teaching them “the value of property and . . . how to economize and take care of it.”
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Besides the implicit shaping effect of owning property, Gibson's will provided very little guidance to his sons beyond urging them to follow the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. He did not name a guardian for Preston. Instead he appointed four men as his executors and the trustees overseeing the bequest to his sons: Washington banker Charles Glover, New York lawyer and High Bridge neighbor Fielding Marshall, his New Orleans law partner Gilbert Hall, and longtime political ally, Tulane trustee, and Louisiana's junior senator Edward Douglass White. Gibson urged his boys to “defer to and confide in” them. It was a move that equated his sons' aristocratic stature with an ability to live independently. It may have acknowledged that the boys were far richer than his brothers and sister. Perhaps they needed distance from the rest of his family.
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