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The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South

by Jr. Thomas Dixon · English · Gutenberg #8462 · 644,230 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South

Author: Jr. Thomas Dixon


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8462]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2020

Language: English

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[ILLUSTRATION: "YOU'D LIKE YOUR PAPA TO COME BACK HOME FROM THE WAR?"]


THE MAN IN GRAY

_A ROMANCE OF NORTH AND SOUTH_

BY

THOMAS DIXON

AUTHOR OF "THE SOUTHERNER," "THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS," "THE BIRTH OF A
NATION," "THE CLANSMAN," ETC.


DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE KAPPA ALPHA FRATERNITY FOUNDED
UNDER THE INSPIRATION OF ROBERT E. LEE 1868



TO THE READER

Now that my story is done I see that it is the strangest fiction that I
have ever written.

Because it is true. It actually happened. Every character in it is
historic. I have not changed even a name. Every event took place.
Therefore it is incredible. Yet I have in my possession the proofs
establishing each character and each event as set forth. They are true
beyond question.

THOMAS DIXON CURRITUCK LODGE _Munden, Va._



LEADING CHARACTERS OF THE STORY

ROBERT E. LEE _The Southern Commander._

MRS. LEE _His Wife._

CUSTIS _His older Son._

MARY _His Daughter._

MRS. MARSHALL _Lee's Sister._

UNCLE BEN _The Butler._

SAM _A Slave._

J.E.B. STUART _"The Flower of Cavaliers."_

FLORA COOKE _His Sweetheart._

PHIL SHERIDAN _His Schoolmate._

FRANCIS PRESTON BLAIR _Lincoln's Messenger._

SENATOR ROBERT TOOMBS _of Georgia._

JOHN BROWN _of Osawatomie._

JOHN E. COOK _His Spy._

VIRGINIA KENNEDY _Cook's Victim._

GERRIT SMITH _A Philanthropist._

GEORGE EVANS _A Labor Leader._

F. B. SANBORN _Brown's Organizer._

REV. THOMAS W. HIGGINSON _A Revolutionist._

WM. C. RIVES _Confederate Senator_

GEN. E. P. ALEXANDER _of Lee's Artillery._

JOHN DOYLE _A Poor White._

MAHALA DOYLE _His Wife._

EDMOND RUFFIN _A Virginia Planter._




THE MAN IN GRAY


CHAPTER I

The fireflies on the Virginia hills were blinking in the dark places
beneath the trees and a katydid was singing in the rosebush beside the
portico at Arlington. The stars began to twinkle in the serene sky. The
lights of Washington flickered across the river. The Capitol building
gleamed, argus-eyed on the hill. Congress was in session, still
wrangling over the question of Slavery and its extension into the
territories of the West.

The laughter of youth and beauty sifted down from open windows.
Preparations were being hurried for the ball in honor of the departing
cadets--Custis Lee, his classmate, Jeb Stuart, and little Phil Sheridan
of Ohio whom they had invited in from Washington.

The fact that the whole family was going to West Point with the boys and
Colonel Robert E. Lee, the new Superintendent, made no difference. One
excuse for an old-fashioned dance in a Southern home was as good as
another. The main thing was to bring friends and neighbors, sisters and
cousins and aunts together for an evening of joy.

A whippo'will cried his weird call from a rendezvous in the shadows of
the lawn, as Sam entered the great hall and began to light the hundreds
of wax tapers in the chandeliers.

"Move dat furniture back now!" he cried to his assistants. "And mind yo'
p's and q's. Doan yer break nuttin."

His sable helpers quietly removed the slender mahogany and rosewood
pieces to the adjoining rooms. They laughed at Sam's new-found note of
dignity and authority.

He was acting butler to-night in Uncle Ben's place. No servant was
allowed to work when ill--no matter how light the tasks to which he was
assigned. Sam was but twenty years old and he had been given the honor
of superintending the arrangements for the dance. And, climax of all,
he had been made leader of the music with the sole right to call the
dances, although he played only the triangle in the orchestra. He was in
high fettle.

When the first carriage entered the grounds his keen ear caught the
crunch of wheels on the gravel. He hurried to call the mistress and
young misses to their places at the door. He also summoned the boys from
their rooms upstairs. He had seen the flash of spotless white in the
carriage. It meant beauty calling to youth on the hill. Sam knew.

Phil came downstairs with Custis. The spacious sweep of the hall, its
waxed floor clear of furniture, with hundreds of blinking candles
flashing on its polished surface, caught his imagination. It _was_ a
fairy world--this generous Southern home. In spite of its wide spaces,
and its dignity, it was friendly. It caught his boy's heart.

Mrs. Lee was just entering. Custis' eyes danced at the sight of his
mother in full dress. He grasped Phil's arm and whispered:

"Isn't my mother the most beautiful woman you ever saw?"

He spoke the words half to himself. It was the instinctive worship of
the true Southern boy, breathed in genuine reverence, with an awe that
was the expression of a religion.

"I was just thinking the same thing, Custis," was the sober reply.

"I beg your pardon, Phil," he hastened to apologize. "I didn't mean to
brag about my mother to you. It just slipped out. I couldn't help it. I
was talking to myself."

"You needn't apologize. I know how you feel. She's already made me think
I'm one of you--"

He paused and watched Mary Lee enter from the lawn leaning on Stuart's
arm. Stuart's boyish banter was still ringing in her ears as she smiled
at him indulgently. She hurried to her mother with an easy, graceful
step and took her place beside her. She was fine, exquisite, bewitching.
She had never come out in Society. She had been born in it. She had her
sweethearts before thirteen and not one had left a shadow on her quiet,
beautiful face. She demanded, by her right of birth as a Southern girl,
years of devotion. And the Southern boy of the old regime was willing to
serve.

Phil stood with Stuart and watched Custis kiss a dozen pretty girls as
they arrived and call each one cousin.

"Is it a joke?" he asked Stuart curiously.

"What?"

"This cousin business."

"Not much. You don't think I'd let him be such a pig if I could help
him, do you?"

"Are they all kin?"

"Yes--" Stuart laughed. "Some of it gets pretty thin in the second and
third cousin lines. But it's thick enough for him to get a kiss from
every one--confound him!"

The hall was crowding rapidly. The rustle of silk, the flash of pearls
and diamonds, the hum of soft drawling voices filled the perfumed air.

Phil's eyes were dazzled with the bevies of the younger set, from
sixteen to eighteen, dressed in soft tulle and organdy; slow of speech;
their voices low, musical, delicious. He was introduced to so many his
head began to swim. To save his soul he couldn't pick out one more
entrancing than another. The moment they spied his West Point uniform he
was fair game. They made eyes at him. They languished and pretended to
be smitten at first sight. Twice he caught himself about to believe one
of them. They seemed so sincere, so dreadfully in earnest. And then he
caught the faintest twinkle in the corner of a dark eye and blushed to
think himself such a fool.

But the sensation of being lionized was delightful. He was in a whirl
of foolish joy when he suddenly realized that Stuart had deserted him,
slipped through the crowd and found his way to Mary Lee. He threw a
quick glance at the pair and one of the four beauties hovering around
him began to whisper:

"Jeb Stuart's just crazy about Mary--"

"Did you ever see anything like it!"

"He couldn't stop even to say how-d'y-do."

"And she's utterly indifferent--"

Sam's voice suddenly rang out with unusual unction and deliberation. He
was imitating Uncle Ben's most eloquent methods.

"Congress-man and Mrs. Rog-er A. Pry-or!"

Mrs. Lee hastened to greet the young editor who had taken high rank in
Congress from the day of his entrance.

Mrs. Pryor was evidently as proud of her young Congressman as he was of
her regal beauty.

Colonel Lee joined the group and led the lawmaker into the library for a
chat on politics.

The first notes of a violin swept the crowd. The hum of conversation and
the ripple of laughter softened into silence. The dusky orchestra is in
place on the little platform. Sam, in all his glory, rises and faces the
eager youth.

He was dressed in his young master's last year's suit, immaculate blue
broadcloth and brass buttons, ruffled shirt and black-braided watch
guard hanging from his neck. His eyes sparkled with pride and his rich,
sonorous voice rang over the crowd like the deep notes of a flute:

"Choose yo' pardners fur de fust cowtillun!"

Again the quick rustle of silk and tulle, the low hum of excited, young
voices and the couples are in place.

A boy cries to the leader:

"We're all ready, Sam."

The young caller of the set knew his business better. He lifted his hand
in a gesture of reverence and silence, as he glanced toward the library
door.

"Jes' a minute la-dees, an' gem-mens," he softly drawled. "Marse Robert
E. Lee and Missis will lead dis set!"

The Colonel briskly entered from the library with his wife on his arm. A
ripple of applause swept the room as they took their places with the gay
youngsters.

Sam lifted his hand; the music began--sweet and low, vibrating with the
sensuous touch of the negro slave whose soul was free in its joyous
melody.

At the first note of his triangle, loud above the music rang Sam's
voice:

"Honors to yo' pardners!"

With graceful courtesies and stately bows the dance began. And over all
a glad negro called the numbers:

"Forward Fours!"

The caller's eyes rolled and his body swayed with the rhythm of
the dance as he watched each set with growing pride. They danced a
quadrille, a mazurka, another quadrille, a schottische, the lancers,
another quadrille, and another and another. They paused for supper at
midnight and then danced them over again.

While the fine young forms swayed to exquisite rhythm and the music
floated over all, the earnest young Congressman bent close to his host
in a corner of the library.

"I sincerely hope, Colonel Lee, that you can see your way clear to make
a reply to this book of Mrs. Stowe which Ruffin has sent you."

"I can't see it yet, Mr. Pryor--"

"Ruffin is a terrible old fire-eater, I know," the Congressman admitted.
"But _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is the most serious blow the South has received
from the Abolitionists. And what makes it so difficult is that its
appeal is not to reason. It is to sentiment. To the elemental emotions
of the mob. No matter whether its picture is true or false, the result
will be the same unless the minds who read it can be cured of its
poison. It has become a sensation. Every Northern Congressman has read
it. A half million copies have been printed and the presses can't keep
up with the demands. This book is storing powder in the souls of the
masses who don't know how to think, because they've never been trained
to think. This explosive emotion is the preparation for fanaticism. We
only wait the coming of the fanatic--the madman who may lift a torch
and hurl it into this magazine. The South is asleep. And when we don't
sleep, we dance. There's no use fooling ourselves. We're dancing on the
crust of a volcano."

Pryor rose.

"I've a number with Mrs. Pryor. I wish you'd think it over, Colonel.
This message is my big reason for missing a night session to be here."

Lee nodded and strolled out on the lawn before the white pillars of the
portico to consider the annoying request. He hated controversy.

Yet he was not the type of man to run from danger. The breed of men from
which he sprang had always faced the enemy when the challenge came.
In the carriage of his body there was a quiet pride--a feeling not of
vanity, but of instinctive power. It was born in him through generations
of men who had done the creative thinking of a nation in the building.
His face might have been described as a little too regular--a little too
handsome perhaps for true greatness, but for the look of deep thought in
his piercing eyes. And the finely chiseled lines of character, positive,
clean-cut, vigorous. He had backbone.

And yet he was not a bitter partisan. He used his brain. He reasoned. He
looked at the world through kindly, conservative eyes. He feared God,
only. He believed in his wife, his children, his blood. And he loved
Virginia, counting it the highest honor to be--not seem to be--an
old-fashioned Virginia gentleman.

He believed in democracy guided by true leaders. This reservation was
not a compromise. It was a cardinal principle. He could conceive of
no democracy worth creating or preserving which did not produce the
superman to lead, shape, inspire and direct its life. The man called of
God to this work was fulfilling a divine mission. He must be of the very
necessity of his calling a nobleman.

Without vanity he lived daily in the consciousness of his own call to
this exalted ideal. It made his face, in repose, grave. His gravity came
from the sense of duty and the consciousness of problems to be met and
solved as his fathers before him had met and solved great issues.

His conservatism had its roots in historic achievements and the chill
that crept into his heart as he thought of this book came, not from the
fear of the possible clash of forces in the future, but from the dread
of changes which might mean the loss of priceless things in a nation's
life. He believed in every fiber of his being that, in spite of slavery,
the old South in her ideals, her love of home, her worship of God, her
patriotism, her joy of living and her passion for beauty stood for
things that are eternal.

And great changes _were_ sweeping over the Republic. He felt this to-day
as never before. The Washington on whose lights he stood gazing was
rapidly approaching the end of the era in which the Nation had evolved a
soul. His people had breathed that soul into the Republic. To this
hour the mob had never ruled America. Its spirit had never dominated a
crisis. The nation had been shaped from its birth through the heart and
brain of its leaders.

But he recalled with a pang that the race of Supermen was passing.
Calhoun had died two years ago. Henry Clay had died within the past two
months. Daniel Webster lay on his death bed at Mansfield. And there
were none in sight to take their places. We had begun the process of
leveling. We had begun to degrade power, to scatter talent, to pull down
our leaders to the level of the mob, in the name of democracy.

He faced this fact with grave misgivings. He believed that the first
requirement of human society, if it shall live, is the discovery of men
fit to command--to lead.

With the passing of Clay, Calhoun and Webster the Washington on which
he gazed, the Washington of 1852, had ceased to be a forum of great
thought, of high thinking and simple living. It had become the scene of
luxury and extravagance. The two important establishments of the city
were Gautier's, the restaurateur and caterer--the French genius who
prepared the feasts for jeweled youth; and Gait, the jeweler who sold
the precious stones to adorn the visions of beauty at these banquets.

The two political parties had fallen to the lowest depths of groveling
to vote getting by nominating the smallest men ever named for
Presidential honors. The Democrats had passed all their real leaders and
named as standard-bearer an obscure little politician of New Hampshire,
Mr. Franklin Pierce. His sole recommendation for the exalted office was
that he would carry one or two doubtful Northern states and with the
solid South could thus be elected. The Whig convention in Baltimore
had cast but thirty-two votes for Daniel Webster and had nominated a
military figurehead, General Winfield Scott.

The Nation was without a leader. And the low rumble of the crowd--the
growl of the primal beast--could be heard in the distance with
increasing distinctness.

The watcher turned from the White City across the Potomac and slowly
walked into his rose garden. Even in September the riot of color was
beyond description. In the splendor of the full Southern moon could be
seen all shades from deep blood red to pale pink. All sizes from the
tiniest four-leaf wild flowers to the gorgeous white and yellow masses
that reared their forms like waves of the surf. He breathed the perfume
and smiled again. A mocking bird, dropping from the bough of a holly,
was singing the glory of a second blooming.

The scene of entrancing beauty drove the thought of strife from his
heart. He turned back toward the house and its joys of youth.

Sam's sonorous voice was ringing in deliberation the grand call of the
evening's festivities:

"Choose-yo-pardners-fer-de-ol-Virginy-Reel!"

And then the stir, the rush, the commotion for place in the final dance.
The reel reaches the whole length of the hall with every foot of space
crowded. There are thirty couples in line when the musicians pause, tune
their instruments and with a sudden burst play "The Gray Eagle." The
Virginia Reel stirs the blood of these Southern boys and girls. Its
swift, graceful action and the inspiration of the old music seem part of
the heart beat of the youth and beauty that sway to its cadences.

The master of Arlington smiled at the memory of the young Congressman's
eloquence. Surely it was only a flight of rhetoric.



CHAPTER II


Phil had finally reached the boys' room after the dance, his head in a
whirl of excitement. Sleep was the last thing he wished. His imagination
was on fire. He had heard of Southern hospitality. He had never dreamed
of such waste of good things, such joy in living, such genuine pleasure
in the meeting of friends and kinfolks. Custis had insisted on every boy
staying all night. A lot of them had stayed. The wide rooms bulged with
them. There were cots and pallets everywhere. He had seen the housemaids
and the menservants carrying them in after the dance. Their own room
contained four beds and as many pallets, and they were all full.

He tried to sleep and couldn't. He dozed an hour, waked at dawn and
began day-dreaming. There was no sense of weariness. His mind was too
alert. The great house, in which he was made to feel as much at home
as in the quiet cottage of his mother in Ohio, fascinated him with its
endless menservants, housemaids, serving boys, cooks, coachmen and
hostlers.

He thought of the contrast with the quiet efficiency and simplicity of
his mother's house. He could see her seated at the little table in the
center of the room, a snow-white cap on her head. The work of the house
had been done without a servant. It had been done so simply and quietly,
he had never been conscious of the fact that it was work at all. It had
seemed a ministry of love for her children. Their help had been given
with equal joy, unconscious of toil, her kitchen floor was always
spotless, with every pot and pan and shining dish in its place as if by
magic.

He wondered how Custis' mother could bear the strain of all these
people. He wondered how she could manage the army of black servants who
hung on her word as the deliverance of an oracle. He could hear the hum
of the life of the place already awake with the rising sun. Down in the
ravine behind the house he caught the ring of a hammer on an anvil and
closer in the sweep of a carpenter's plane over a board. A colt was
calling to his mother at the stables and he could hear the chatter and
cries of the stable boys busy with the morning feed.

He rose, stepped gingerly beside the sleepers on the floor and stood by
an open window. His mind was stirring with a curious desire to see the
ghost that haunted this house, its spacious grounds and fields. He,
too, had read _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and wondered. The ghost must be here
hiding in some dark corner of cabin or field--the ghost of deathless
longing for freedom--the ghost of cruelty--the ghost of the bloodhound,
the lash and the auction block.

Somehow he couldn't realize that such things could be, now that he was
a guest in a Southern home and saw the bright side of their life. Never
had he seen anything brighter than the smiles of those negro musicians
as they proudly touched their instruments: the violin, the banjo, the
flute, the triangle and castanets, and watched the dancers swing through
each number. There could be no mistake about the ring of joy in Sam's
voice. It throbbed with unction. It pulsed with pride. Its joy was
contagious. He caught himself glancing at his rolling eyes and swaying
body. Once he muttered aloud:

"Just look at that fool nigger!"

But somewhere in this paradise of flowers and song birds, of music and
dance, of rustling silk, of youth and beauty, the Ghost of Slavery
crouched.

In a quiet way he would watch for it to walk. He had to summon all his
pride of Section and training in the catch words of the North to keep
from falling under the charm of the beautiful life he felt enfolding
him.

He no longer wondered why every Northern man who moved South forgot
the philosophy of the Snows and became a child of the Sun. He felt the
subtle charm of it stealing into his heart and threw off the spell with
an effort.

A sparrow chirped under the window. A redbird flashed from a rosebush
and a mocking bird from a huge magnolia began to softly sing his morning
love song to his mate.

He heard a yawn, turned and saw Custis rubbing his eyes.

"For heaven's sake, Phil, why don't you sleep?"

"Tried and can't."

"Don't like your bed?"

"Too much excited."

"One of those girls hooked you?"

"No. I couldn't make up my mind. So many beauties they rattled me."

"All right," Custis said briskly. "Let's get up and look around the old
plantation."

"Good," Phil cried.

Custis called Jeb Stuart in vain. He refused to answer or to budge.

Phil found his shoes at the door neatly blacked and the moment he began
to stir a grinning black boy was at his heels to take his slightest
order.

"I don't want _any_thing!" he said at last to his dusky tormentor.

"Nuttin tall, sah?"

"Nuttin tall!"

Phil smiled at the eager, rolling eyes.

"Get out--you make me laugh--"

The boy ducked.

"Yassah--des call me if ye wants me--I'se right outside de do'."

The two cadets ate breakfast alone. The house was yet asleep--except the
children. Their voices could be heard on the lawn at play. They had been
put to bed early, at eleven o'clock. They were up with the birds
as usual. The sun was an hour high, shining the glory of a perfect
September morning. The boys strolled on the lawn. The children were
everywhere, playing in groups. Little black and white boys mixed
indiscriminately. Robbie Lee was playing rooster fight with Sid, his
boon companion. The little black boy born nearest his birthday was
dedicated to be his friend, companion and body servant for life.

Phil paused to see the rooster fight.

The boys folded their arms and flew at each other sideways, using their
elbows as a rooster uses his spurs.

Robbie was pressing Sid against the fence of the rose garden. Sid's
return blows lacked strength.

Robbie stamped his foot angrily.

"Come on now--no foolin'--fight! There's no fun in a fight, if you don't
fight!"

Sid bucked up and flew at his enemy.

Robbie saw the two older boys watching and gave a star performance. As
Sid lunged at him with uplifted arms, and drew back to strike a stunning
blow, Robbie suddenly stooped, hurled his elbow under Sid's arm, lifted
him clear of the ground and he fell sprawling.

Robbie stood in triumph over the prostrate figure.

Phil laughed.

"You got him that time, Robbie!"

Robbie squared himself, raised his spurs and waited for Sid to rise.

Sid was in no hurry. He had enough. He hadn't cried. But he was close to
it.

"Ye needn't put up dem spurs at me no mo'."

"Come on again!" Robbie challenged.

"Na, sah. I'se done dead. Ye stick dat spur clean froo me. Hit mighty
nigh come out on de odder side!"

"Got enough?"

The game was suddenly ended by a barefoot white boy approaching Robbie.
Johnny Doyle carried a dozen teal ducks, six in each hand. They were so
heavy for his hands that their heads dragged the ground.

Robbie rushed to meet his friend.

"Oh, John, where'd you get the ducks?"

"Me and daddy killed 'em this mornin' at sun-up on the river."

"Why, the duck season isn't on yet, is it?" Custis asked the boy.

"No, sir, but daddy saw a big raft of teal swingin' into the bend of the
river yesterday and we got up before daylight and got a mess."

"You brought 'em to me, John?" Robbie asked eagerly.

"Jes the same, Robbie. Dad sent 'em to Colonel Lee."

"That's fine of your daddy, John," Custis said, placing his hand on the
little bare sunburnt head.

"Yessir, my daddy says Colonel Lee's the greatest man in this county and
he's mighty proud to be his neighbor."

"Tell him my father will thank him personally before we leave and say
for all that he has given us a treat."

Custis handed the ducks to Sid.

"Take them to the kitchen and tell Aunt Hannah to have them for dinner,
sure."

Sid started for the kitchen and Robbie called after him:

"Hurry back, Sid--"

"Yassah--right away, sah!"

Robbie seized John's hand.

"You'll stay all day?"

"I can't."

"We're goin' fishin'--"

"Honest?"

"Sure. Uncle Ben's sick. But after dinner he's promised to take us. He's
not too sick to fish."

"I can't stay," the barefoot boy sighed.

"Come on. There's three bird's nests in the orchard. The second layin'.
It ain't no harm to break up the second nest. Birds've no business
layin' twice in one season. We _ought_ to break 'em up."

"I'm afraid I can't."

His tone grew weaker and Robbie pressed him.

"Come on. We'll get the bird's eggs and chase the calves and colts till
the dinner bell rings, ride the horses home from the fields, and go
fishin' after dinner and stay till dark."

"No--"

"Come on!"

John glanced up the road toward the big gate beyond which his mother was
waiting his return. The temptation was more than his boy's soul could
resist. He shook his head--paused--and grinned.

"Come on, Sid, John's goin' with us," Robbie called to his young
henchman as he approached.

"All right," John consented, finally throwing every scruple to the
winds. "Ma'll whip me shore, but, by granny, it'll be worth it!"

The aristocrat slipped his arm around his chum and led him to the
orchard in triumph.

Custis laughed.

"He'd rather play with that little, poor white rascal than any boy in
the country."

"Don't blame him," Phil replied. "He may be dirty and ragged but he's a
real boy after a real boy's heart. And the handsomest little beggar I
ever saw--who is he?"

"The boy of a poor white family, the Doyles. They live just outside our
gate on a ten-acre farm. His mother's trying to make him go to school.
His father laughs and lets him go hunting and fishing."

They were strolling past the first neat row of houses in the servants'
quarters. Phil thought of them as the slave quarters. Yet he had not
heard the word slave spoken since his arrival. These black people were
"servants" and some of them were the friends and confidants of their
master and his household. Phil paused in front of a cottage. The yard
flamed with autumn flowers. Through the open door and windows came the
hum of spinning wheels and the low, sweet singing of the dark spinners,
spinning wool for the winter clothing of the estate. From the next door
came the click and crash of the looms weaving the warm cloth.

"You make your own cloth?" the Westerner asked in surprise.

"Of course, for the servants. It takes six spinners and three weavers
working steadily all year to keep up with it, too."

"Isn't it expensive?"

"Maybe. We never thought of it. We just make it. Always have in our
family for a hundred years."

They passed the blacksmith's shop and saw him shoeing a blooded colt.
Phil touched the horse's nostrils with a gentle hand and the colt nudged
him.

"It's funny how a horse knows a horseman instinctively--isn't it, Phil?"

"Yes. He knows I'm going to join the cavalry."

They moved down the long row of whitewashed cottages, each with its yard
of flowers and each with a huge pile of wood in the rear--wood enough
to keep a sparkling fire through the winter. Chubby-faced babies were
playing in the sanded walks and smiling young mothers watched them from
the doors.

Phil started to put a question, stammered and was silent.

"What is it?" Custis asked.

"You'll pardon my asking it, old boy, but are these black folks
married?"

The Southern boy laughed heartily.

"I should say so. A negro wedding is one of the joys of a plantation
boy's life."

"But isn't it awful when they're separated?"

"They're not separated."

"Never?"

"Not on this plantation. Nor on any estate whose master and mistress are
our friends. It's not done in our set."

"You keep them when they're old, lazy and worthless?"

"If they're married, yes. It's a luxury we never deny ourselves, this
softening of the rigor of the slave regime. It's not business. But
it's the custom of the country. To separate a husband and wife is an
unheard-of thing among our people."

The thing that impressed the Westerner in those white rows of little
homes was the order and quiet of it all. Every yard was swept clean.
There was nowhere a trace of filth or disease-breeding refuse. And birds
were singing in the bushes beside these slave cottages as sweetly as
they sang for the master and mistress in the pillared mansion on the
hill. They passed the stables and paused to watch a dozen colts playing
in the inclosure. Beyond the stable under the shadows of great oaks
was the dog kennel. A pack of fox hounds rushed to the gate with loud
welcome to their young master. He stooped to stroke each head and call
each dog's name. A wagging tail responded briskly to every greeting. In
another division of the kennel romped a dozen bird-dogs, pointers and
setters. The puppies were nearly grown and eager for the fields. They
climbed over Custis in yelping puppy joy that refused all rebuffs.

Phil looked in vain for the bloodhounds. He was afraid to ask about them
lest he offend his host. Custis had never seen a bloodhound and could
not guess the question back of his schoolmate's silence.

Sam entered the inclosure with breakfast for the dogs.

Phil couldn't keep his eyes off the sunlit, ebony face. His smile was
contagious. His voice was music.

The Westerner couldn't resist the temptation to draw him out.

"You were certainly dressed up last night, Sam!"

"Yer lak dat suit I had on, sah?"

"It was a great combination."

"Yassah, dat's me, sah," the negro laughed. "I'se a great
combination--yassah!"

He paused and threw his head back as if to recall the words. Then in a
voice rich and vibrant with care-free joy he burst into song:

"Yassah!"

  "When I goes out ter promenade
  I dress so fine and gay
  I'm bleeged to take my dog along
  Ter keep de gals away."

Again his laughter rang in peals of sonorous fun. They joined in his
laugh.

A stable boy climbed the fence and called:

"Don't ye want yer hosses, Marse Custis?" He was jealous of Sam's
popularity.

Custis glanced at Phil.

"Sure. Let's ride."

"All right, Ned--saddle them."

The boy leaped to the ground and in five minutes led two horses to the
gate. As they galloped past the house for the long stretch of white
roadway that led across the river to the city, Phil smiled as he saw Jeb
Stuart emerge from the rose garden with Mary Lee. Custis ignored the
unimportant incident.



CHAPTER III


Stuart led Mary to a seat beneath an oak, brushed the dust away with his
cap and asked her to honor him. He bowed low over her hand and dared to
kiss it.

She passed the gallant act as a matter of course and sat down beside him
with quiet humor. She knew the symptoms. A born flirt, as every true
Southern girl has always been, she eyed his embarrassment with surprise.
She knew that he was going to speak under the resistless impulse of
youth and romance, and that no hearts would be broken on either side no
matter what the outcome.

She watched him indulgently. She had to like him. He was the kind of boy
a girl couldn't help liking. He was vital, magnetic and exceptionally
good looking. He sang and danced and flirted, but beneath the fun and
foolishness slumbered a fine spirit, tender, reverent, deeply religious.
It was this undercurrent of strength that drew the girl. He was always
humming a song, his heart bubbling over with joy. He had never uttered
an oath or touched a drop of liquor amid all the gaiety of the times in
which he lived.

"Miss Mary," he began slowly.

"Now Jeb," she interrupted. "You don't _have_ to, you know--"

Stuart threw his head back, laughed, and sang a stanza from "Annie
Laurie" in a low, tender voice. He paused and faced his fair tormentor.

"Miss Mary, I've got to!"

"You don't have to make love to me just because you're my brother's
classmate--"

"You know I'm not!" he protested.

"You're about to begin."

"But not for that reason, Miss Mary--"

He held her gaze so seriously that she blushed before she could recover
her poise. He saw his advantage and pressed it.

"I'm telling you that I love you because you're the most adorable girl
I've ever known."

His boyish, conventional words broke the spell.

"I appreciate the tribute which you so gallantly pay me, Sir Knight. But
I happen to know that the moonlight, the music of a dance, the song of
birds this morning and the beauty of the landscape move you, as they
should. You're young. You're too good looking. You're fine and unspoiled
and I like you, Jeb. But you don't know yet what love means."

"I do, Miss Mary, I do."

"You don't and neither do I. You're in love with love. And so am I. It's
the morning of life and why shouldn't we be like this?"

"There's no hope?" he asked dolefully.

"Of course, there's hope. There's something fine in you, and you'll find
yourself in the world when you ride forth to play your part. And I'll
follow you with tender pride."

"But not with love," he sighed.

"Maybe--who knows?" she smiled.

"Is that all the hope you can give me?"

"Isn't it enough?"

He gazed into her serious eyes a moment and laughed with boyish
enthusiasm.

"Yes, it is, Miss Mary! You're glorious. You're wonderful. You make me
ashamed of my foolishness. You inspire me to do things. And I'm going to
do them for your sake."

"For your own sake, because God has put the spark in your soul. Your
declaration of love has made me very happy. We're too young yet to take
it seriously. We must both live our life in its morning before we settle
down to the final things. They'll come too soon."

"I'm going to love you always, Miss Mary," he protested.

"I want you to. But you'll probably marry another girl."

"Never!"

"And I know you'll be her loyal knight, her devoted slave. It's a way
our Southern boys have. And it's beautiful."

Stuart studied the finely chiseled face with a new reverence.

"Miss Mary, you've let me down so gently. I don't feel hurt at all."

A sweet silence fell between them. A breeze blew the ringlets of the
girl's hair across the pink of her cheek. A breeze from the garden laden
with the mingled perfume of roses. A flock of wild ducks swung across
the lawn high in the clear sky and dipped toward the river. Across the
fields came a song of slaves at work in the cornfield, harvesting the
first crop of peas planted between the rows.

Stuart caught her hand, pressed it tenderly and kissed it.

"You're an angel, Miss Mary. And I'm going to worship you, if you won't
let me love you."

The girl returned his earnest look with a smile and slowly answered:

"All right, Beauty Stuart, we'll see--"



CHAPTER IV


The dinner at night was informal. Colonel Lee had invited three personal
friends from Washington. He hoped in the touch of the minds of these
leaders to find some relief from the uneasiness with which the reading
of Mrs. Stowe's book had shadowed his imagination.

The man about whom he was curious was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois,
the most brilliant figure in the Senate. In the best sense he
represented the national ideal. A Northern man, he had always viewed the
opinions and principles of the South with broad sympathy.

The new Senator from Georgia, on the other hand, had made a sensation in
the house as the radical leader of the South. Lee wondered if he were as
dangerous a man as the conservative members of the Whig party thought.
Toombs had voted the Whig ticket, but his speeches on the rights of the
South on the Slavery issues had set him in a class by himself.

Mr. and Mrs. Pryor had spent the night of the dance at Arlington and had
consented to stay for dinner.

Douglas had captured the young Virginia congressman. And Mrs. Douglas
had become an intimate friend of Mrs. Pryor.

When Douglas entered the library and pressed Lee's hand, the master
of Arlington studied him with keen interest. He was easily the most
impressive figure in American politics. The death of Calhoun and Clay
and the sudden passing of Webster had left but one giant on the floor of
the Senate. They called him the "Little Giant." He was still a giant.
He had sensed the approaching storm of crowd madness and had sought the
age-old method of compromise as the safety valve of the nation.

He had not read history in vain. He knew that all statesmanship is the
record of compromise--that compromise is another name for reason. The
Declaration of Independence was a compromise between the radicalism of
Thomas Jefferson and the conservatism of the colonies. In the original
draft of the Declaration, Jefferson had written a paragraph arraigning
slavery which had been omitted:

"He (the King of Great Britain) has waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him; capturing and
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the _Christian_ King
of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should
be bought and sold, he prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And
that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye,
he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to
purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the
people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes
committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges
them to commit against the lives of another."

This indictment of Slavery and the Slave trade was stricken from the
Declaration of Independence in deference to the opposition of both
Northern and Southern slave owners who held that the struggling young
colonies must have labor at all hazards.

Lee knew that the Constitution also was a compromise of conflicting
interests. But for the spirit of compromise--of reason--this instrument
of human progress could never have been created. The word "Slave" or
"Slavery" does not occur within it, and yet three of its most important
provisions established the institution of chattel slavery as the basis
of industrial life. The statesmen who wrote the Constitution did not
wish these clauses embodied in it. Yet the Union could not have been
established without them. Our leaders reasoned, and reasoned wisely,
that Slavery must perish in the progress of human society, and,
therefore, they accepted the compromise.

There has never been a statesman in the history of the world who has
not used this method of constructive progress. There will never be a
statesman who succeeds who can use any other method in dealing with
masses of his fellow men.

Douglas was the coming constructive statesman of the republic and all
eyes were being focused on him. His life at the moment was the fevered
center of the nation's thought. That his ambitions were boundless no
one who knew the man doubted. That his patriotism was as genuine and as
great all knew at last.

Lee studied every feature of his fine face. No eye could miss him in
an assemblage of people, no matter how great the numbers. His compact
figure was erect, aggressive, dominant. A personage, whose sense of
power came from within, not without. He was master of himself and of
others. He looked the lion and he was one. The lines of his face were
handsome in the big sense, strong, regular, masculine. He drew young
men as a magnet. His vitality inspired them. His stature was small in
height, measured by inches, but of such dignity, power and magnetism
that he suggested Napoleon.

He smiled into Colonel Lee's face and his smile lighted the room. Every
man and woman present was warmed by it.

Douglas had scarcely greeted Mrs. Lee and passed into an earnest
conversation with the young Congressman when Robert Toombs of Georgia
entered.

Toombs had become within two years the successor of John C. Calhoun. He
had the genius of Calhoun, eloquence as passionate, as resistless;
and he had all of Calhoun's weaknesses. He called a spade a spade.
He loathed compromise. Three years before he had swept the floor and
galleries of the House with a burst of impassioned eloquence that had
made him a national figure.

Lifting his magnificent head he had cried:

"I do not hesitate to avow before this House and the Country, and in
the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to
drive us from the Territory of California and New Mexico, purchased
by the blood of Southern white people, and to abolish Slavery in the
District of Columbia, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation
upon half the States of this Confederacy, _I am for disunion_. The
Territories are the common property of the United States. You are their
common agents; it is your duty while they are in the Territorial state
to remove all impediments to their free enjoyment by both sections--the
slave holder and the non-slave holder!"

He was the man of iron will, of passionate convictions. He might lead a
revolution. He could not compromise.

His rapidly growing power was an ominous thing in the history of the
South. Lee studied his face with increasing fascination.

In this gathering no man or woman thought of wealth as the source of
power or end of life. No one spoke of it. Office, rank, position,
talent, beauty, charm, personality--these things alone could count.
These men and women _lived_. They did not merely exist. They were making
the history of the world and yet they refused to rush through life.
Their souls demanded hours of repose, of thought, of joy and they took
them.

Toombs' pocket was stuffed with a paper-backed edition of a French play.
It was his habit to read them in the original with keen enjoyment in
moments of leisure. The hum of social life filled the room and strife
was forgotten. Douglas and Toombs were boys again and Lee was their
companion.

Mary Lee managed to avoid Stuart and took her seat beside Phil
Sheridan--not to tease her admirer but to give to her Western guest
the warmest welcome of the old South. She knew the dinner would be a
revelation to Phil and she would enjoy his appreciation.

The long table groaned under the luxuries of the season. Course
succeeded course, cooked with a delicate skill unknown to the world of
to-day. The oysters, fresh, fat, luscious, were followed by diamond-back
terrapin stew as a soup.

Phil tasted it and whispered to his fair young hostess.

"Miss Mary, what is this I'm eating?"

"Don't you like it?"

"I never expected to taste it on earth. I've only dreamed about it on
high."

"It's only terrapin stew. We serve it as a soup."

"The angels made it."

"No, Aunt Hannah."

"I won't take it back. Angels only could brew this soup."

The terrapin was followed by old Virginia ham and turnip greens. And
then came the turkey with chestnut stuffing and jellies. The long table,
flashing with old china and silver, held the staples of ham and turkey
as ornaments as well as dainties for the palate. The real delicacies
were served later, the ducks which Doyle had sent the Colonel, and plate
after plate of little, brown, juicy birds called sora, so tender and
toothsome they could be eaten bones and all.

When Phil wound up with cakes and custards, apples, pears and nuts from
the orchard and fields, his mind was swimming in a dream of luxury. And
over it all the spirit of true hospitality brooded. A sense of home and
reality as intimate, as genuine as if he sat beside his mother's chair
in the little cottage in Ohio.

"Lord save me," he breathed. "If I stay here long I'll have but one
hope, to own a plantation and a home like this--"

Toombs sat on Lee's right and Douglas on his left. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor
occupied the places of honor beside Mrs. Lee.

The Colonel's keen eye studied Douglas with untiring patience. To his
rising star, the man who loved the Union, was drawn as by a magnet.
Toombs, the Whig, belonged to his own Party, the aristocracy of brains
and the inheritors of the right to leadership. He was studying Toombs
with growing misgivings. He dreaded the radicalism within the heart of
the Southern Whig.

His eye rested on Sam, serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's
absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the
spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw
the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling
uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of
self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in
shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the
wit and intelligence of the two leaders at his side.

Over this dusky figure, from the dawn of American history our fathers
had wrangled and compromised. More than once he had threatened to divide
or destroy the Union. Reason and the compromises of great minds had
saved us. In Sam he saw this grinning skeleton at his feast.

He could depend on the genius of Douglas when the supreme crisis came.
He felt the quality of his mind tonight. But could Douglas control the
mob impulse of the North where such appeals as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had
gripped the souls of millions and reason no longer ruled life?

There was the rub.

There was no question of the genius of Douglas. The question was could
any leadership count if the mob, not the man, became our real ruler? The
task of Douglas was to hold the fanatic of the North while he soothed
the passions of the radical of the South. Henry Clay had succeeded. But
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had not been written in his day.

Toombs was becoming a firebrand. His eloquence was doing in the South
what Mrs. Stowe's novel was doing in the North--preparing the soil for
revolution--planting gunpowder under the foundations of society.

Could these forces yet be controlled or were they already beyond
control?



CHAPTER V


After dinner, Jeb Stuart succeeded in separating Mary from Phil and
began again his adoration. The men adjourned to the library to discuss
the Presidential Campaign and weigh the chances of General Scott against
Franklin Pierce. The comment of Toombs was grim in its sarcasm and early
let him out of the discussion.

"It doesn't matter in the least, gentlemen, who is elected in November,"
he observed. "There's nothing before the country as yet. Not even an
honest-to-God man."

Lee shook his head gravely.

Toombs parried his protest.

"I know, Colonel Lee, you're fond of the old General. You fought with
him in Mexico. But--" he dropped his voice to a friendly whisper--"all
the same, you know that what I say is true."

He took a cigar from the mantel, lighted it and waved to the group.

"I'll take a little stroll and smoke."

Custis took Phil to the cottage of the foreman to see a night school in
session.

"You mean the overseer's place?" Phil asked eagerly, as visions of Simon
Legree flashed through his mind.

"No--I mean Uncle Ike's cottage. He's the foreman of the farm. We have
no white overseer."

Phil was shocked. He had supposed every Southern plantation had a white
overseer as slave driver with a blacksnake whip in his hand. A negro
foreman was incredible. As a matter of fact there were more negro
foremen than white overseers in the South.

In Uncle Ike's cottage by the light of many candles the school for boys
was in session. Custis' brother "Rooney," was the teacher. He had six
pupils besides Sam. Not one of them knew his lesson to-night and Rooney
was furious.

As Phil and Custis entered, he was just finishing a wrathful lecture.
His pupils were standing in a row grinning their apologies.

"I've told you boys for the last three weeks that I won't stand this.
You don't have to go to school to me if you don't want to. But if you
join my school you've got to study. Do you hear me?"

"Yassah!" came the answer in solid chorus.

"Well, you'll do more than hear me to-night. You're going to heed what I
say. I'm going to thrash the whole school."

Sam broke into a loud laugh. And a wail of woe came from every dusky
figure.

"Dar now!"

"Hear dat, folks--?"

"I been a tellin' ye chillun--"

"I lubs my spellin' book--but, oh, dat hickory switch!"

"Oh, Lordy--"

"Gib us anudder chance, Marse Rooney!"

"Not another chance," was the stern answer. "Lay off your coats."

They began to peel their coats. Big, strapping, husky fellows nudging
one another and grinning at their fourteen-year-old schoolmaster. It was
no use to protest.

They knew they deserved it. A whipping was one of the minor misfortunes
of life. Its application was universal. No other method of discipline
had yet been dreamed by the advanced thinkers and rulers of the world.
"Spare the rod and spoil the child" was accepted as the Word of God and
only a fool could doubt it. The rod was the emblem of authority for
child, pupil, apprentice and soldier. The negro slave as a workman got
less of it than any other class. It was the rule of a Southern master
never to use the rod on a slave except for crime if it could be avoided.
To flog one for laziness was the exception, not the rule.

The old Virginia gentleman prided himself particularly on the tenderness
and care with which he guarded the life of his servants. If the weather
was cold and his men exposed, he waited to see that they had dry clothes
and a warm drink before they went to bed. He never failed to remember
that his white skin could endure more than their sunburned dark ones.

The young school-teacher had no scruples on applying the rod. He
selected his switches with care, and tested their strength and
flexibility while he gave the bunch a piece of his mind.

"What do you think I'm coming down here every night for, anyhow?" he
stormed.

"Lordy, Marse Rooney," Sam pleaded, "doan we all pay you fur our
schoolin'?"

"Yes, you do when I can manage to choke it out of you. One dozen eggs a
month or one pullet every two months. And I don't even ask you where you
got the eggs or the pullet."

"Marse Rooney!" protested Sam. "Yer know we gets 'em outen our own yards
er buys 'em from de servants."

"I hope you do. Though my mother says she don't know how we eat so many
chickens and eggs at the house. Anyhow I'm not here because I'm going to
get rich on the tuition you pay me. I'm not here for my health. I'm here
from a sense of duty to you boys--"

"Yassah, we know dat, sah!"

"Give us annuder chance an' we sho' study dem lessons--"

"I gave you another chance the last time. I'll try a little hickory tea
this time."

He began at the end of the line and belabored each one faithfully. They
shouted in mockery and roared with laughter, scampered over the room and
dodged behind chairs and tables.

Phil fairly split his sides laughing.

When the fun was over, they drew close to their teacher and promised
faithfully to have every word of the next lesson. They nudged each other
and whispered their jokes about the beating.

"Must er bin er flea bitin' me!"

"I felt sumfin. Don't 'zactly know what it wuz. Mebbe a chigger!"

"Must er been a flea. Hit bit me, too!"

Sam tried to redeem himself for failing on his lessons in arithmetic.
He had long ago learned to read and write and had asked for a course in
history. The young teacher had given him a copy of _Gulliver's Travels_.

"Look a here, Marse Rooney, I been a readin' dat book yer gimme--"

"Well, that's good."

"Yer say dat book's history?"

"Well, it's what we call fiction, but I think fiction's the very best
history we can read. It may not have happened just that way but it's
true all the same."

"Well, ef hit nebber happened, I dunno 'bout dat," Sam objected. "I been
suspicionin' fer a long time dat some o' dem things that Gulliver say
nebber happen nohow."

"You read it," the teacher ordered.

"Yassah, I sho gwine ter read it, happen er no happen. Glory be ter God.
Just 'cause yer tells me, sah!"



CHAPTER VI


The next morning found Phil walking again between the white, clean rows
of the quarter houses. He was always finding something to interest him.
Every yard had its gorgeous red autumn flowers. Some of them had
roses in bloom. The walks from the gate to the door were edged with
white-washed bricks or conch shells. The conch shells were souvenirs of
summer outings at the seashore.

In the corner of the back yard there was the tall pole on which were
hung five or six dried gourds with tiny holes cut in the sides for the
martins. And every gourd had its black family. The martins were the
guardians of the servants' chicken yards. The hawks were numerous and
the woods close to the quarters. Few chickens were lost by hawks. The
martins circled the skies in battalions, watching, chattering, guarding,
basking in the southern sun.

At noon the assembly bell rang at the end of the Broadway of the
quarters. From every cottage, from field and stable, blacksmith shop,
carpenter's shop, the house of the spinners, the weavers, the dairy, the
negroes poured toward the shed beside the bell tower.

"What is it?" Phil asked of Custis.

"Saturday noon. All work stops."

"My Lord, it's been raining nearly all morning. The field hands haven't
worked a lick all day. Do they stop, too?"

"It's the unwritten law of the South. We would no more think of working
on Saturday afternoon than on Sunday."

"What are they gathering under that shed for?" Phil inquired.

Custis led him to the shed where Ike, the foreman, stood with Mrs. Lee
beside a long table on which were piled the provisions for the week to
follow.

The negroes laughed and chattered like a flock of blackbirds picking
grain in a wheat field. To each head of a family was given six pounds
of meat for each person. A father, mother and two children received
twenty-four pounds. Their bread was never rationed. The barrel in each
cottage was filled from the grist mill, a bag full at a time. They had
their own garden and flocks of chickens. Sugar, coffee and molasses were
given on the first of each month.

"Come right back here now all ob you!" Ike shouted, "des ez quick ez yer
put yo vittles away. De Missis gwine gib ye yo' winter close now, case
she gwine ter Wes' Pint next week."

The provisions were swept from the long table. Out of the storehouse
came huge piles of clothing and blankets. Each package was marked with
the owner's name.

To each pair, man and wife, or two children, was given a new wool
blanket. This was, of course, added to the stock each house had already.
A woolen blanket was good for ten years' wear. Many a servant's house
had a dozen blankets for each bed. Besides the blankets, to every woman
with a baby was given a quilted comfort.

To each man, woman and child were allotted two complete woolen suits for
the winter, a new pair of shoes and three pairs of stockings. In the
spring two suits of cotton would be given for summer. The thrifty ones
had their cedar chests piled with clothes. Many had not worn the suits
given out a year ago.

The heads of large families trudged away with six or seven blankets,
a comfort, and twenty suits of clothes. It sometimes took the father,
mother and two of the children to carry the load.

But the most amazing thing which Phil saw was the sudden transformation
of the shed into a market for the sale of slave produce to the mistress
of Arlington.

Mrs. Lee had watched the distribution of clothes, blankets, quilts,
shoes and stockings for the winter and then became the purchaser of all
sorts of little luxuries which the slave had made in his leisure hours
on Saturday afternoons and at night. The little boys and girls sold
her dried wild fruits. The women had made fine jellies. They all had
chickens and eggs to sell to the big house. Some had become experts in
making peanut brittle and fudge.

They not only sold their wares here, but they also sold them in the
market in Washington. The old men were expert basket and broom makers.
The slaves made so much extra money on their chickens, peanuts, popcorn,
fudge, brittle, molasses cakes, baskets, brooms, mats and taking in
sewing, that they were able to buy many personal luxuries. Phil observed
one dusky belle already arrayed in a silk dress for the Saturday
afternoon outing with her beau. A few of them had their Sunday dresses
made by fashionable mantua makers in Washington.

In addition to the regular distribution of clothing, the household
supplied to the servants in rapid succession everything worn by master,
mistress, son or daughter. Knowing that their clothes were being watched
and guarded by longing eyes, they never wore them very long. Mary Lee
was distributing a dozen dresses now to the girls. They had been made
within the past year.

Phil observed Sam arrayed in a swallowtail coat of immaculate cut stroll
by with his best girl. She was dressed in silk with full hoop-skirts,
ruffles, ribbons and flowers.

Sid annoyed Sam by calling loudly:

"Doan yer stay too late ter dat party. Ef ye do I'll hatter sing fur
ye--

  "Run, nigger, run, de patterole ketch you.
  Nigger run, de nigger flew,
  De nigger loss his best ole shoe!
  Run, nigger, run. Run, nigger, run. Run, nigger, run."

Sam waved his arm in a long laugh.

"Dey won't git me, chile. I'se er conjur man, I is!"

Phil had supposed the patrol of the mysterious mounted police of the
South--the men who rode at night--were to the slave always a tragic
terror.

It seemed a thing for joke and ribald song.

After lunch, the negroes entered on the afternoon's fun or work. The
industrious ones plied their trades to earn money for luxuries. The boys
who loved to fish and hunt rabbits hurried to the river and the fields.
There was always a hound at their service for a rabbit hunt on Saturday
afternoons. Some were pitching horse shoes. Two groups began to play
marbles.

The marketing done for the house, the mistress of Arlington, with
medicine case in hand, started on her round of healing for body and
mind. Mary offered to go with her but the mother saw Stuart hovering
about and quietly answered:

"No. You can comfort poor Jeb. He looks disconsolate."

Into every cottage she moved, a quiet, ministering angel. Every hope and
fear of ailing young or old found in her an ear to hear, a heart to pity
and an arm to save.

If she found a case of serious illness, a doctor was called and a nurse
set to watch by the bedside. Every delicacy and luxury the big house
held was at the command of the sufferer and that without stint.

In all these clean flower-set cottages there was not a single crippled
servant maimed in the service of his master. No black man or woman was
allowed to do dangerous work. All dangerous tasks were done by hired
white laborers. They were hired by the day under contract through their
boss. Even ditches on the farm if they ran through swamp lands infested
by malaria, were dug by white hired labor. The master would not permit
his slave to take such risks.

But the most important ministry of the mistress of Arlington was in the
medicine for the soul which she brought to the life and character of
each servant for whose training she had accepted responsibility.

To her even the master proudly and loyally yielded authority. Her sway
over the servants was absolute in its spiritual power. Into their souls
in hours of trial she poured the healing and inspiration of a beautiful
spirit. The mistress of Arlington was delicate and frail in body. But
out of her physical suffering the spirit rose to greater heights with
each day's duty and service.

This mysterious power caught the warm imagination of the negroes. They
were "servants" to others. They were her _slaves_ and they rejoiced
in the bond that bound them. They knew that her body had no rest from
morning until far into the hours of the night if one of her own needed
care. The master could shift his responsibility to a trained foreman.
No forewoman could take her place. To the whole scheme of life she gave
strength and beauty. The beat of her heart made its wheels go round.

The young Westerner studied her with growing admiration and pity. She
was the mistress of an historic house. She was the manager of an estate.
She was the counselor of every man, woman and child in happiness or in
sorrow. She was an accomplished doctor. She was a trained nurse. She
taught the hearts of men and women with a wisdom more profound and
searching than any preacher or philosopher from his rostrum. She had
mastered the art of dressmaking and the tailor's trade. She was an
expert housekeeper. She lived at the beck and call of all. She was
idolized by her husband. Her life was a supreme act of worship--a
devotion to husband, children, friends, the poor, the slave that made
her a high-priestess of humanity.

The thing that struck Phil with terrific force was that this beautiful
delicate woman was the slave of slaves.

As a rule, they died young.

He began to wonder how a people of the intelligence of these proud
white Southerners could endure such a thing as Slavery. Its waste, its
extravagance, its burdens were beyond belief.

He laughed when he thought of his mother crying over _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_. Yet a new edition of a hundred thousand copies had just come
from the press.

Early Sunday morning Custis asked him to go down to the quarters to see
Uncle Ben, the butler, who had not yet resumed his duties. He had sent
an urgent message to his young master asking him to be kind enough to
call on Sunday. The message was so formal and reserved Custis knew it
was of more than usual importance.

They found the old man superintending a special breakfast of fried fish
for two little boys, neatly served at a table with spotless cloth.
Robbie and his friend, John Doyle, were eating the fish they had caught
with Uncle Ben the day before. They were as happy as kings and talked of
fish and fishing with the unction of veteran sportsmen.

The greeting to Custis was profound in its courtesy and reverence.
He was the first born of the great house. He was, therefore, the
prospective head of the estate. Jeffersonian Democrats had long ago
abolished the old English law of primogeniture. But the idea was in the
blood of the Virginia planter. The servants caught it as quickly as they
caught the other English traits of love of home, family, kin, the cult
of leisure, the habit of Church, the love of country. It was not an
accident that the decisions of the courts of the Old South were quoted
by English barristers and accepted by English judges as law. The Common
Law of England was the law of Southern Seaboard States. It always had
been and it is to-day.

"How is you dis mornin', Marse Custis?" Ben asked with a stately bow.

"Fine, Uncle Ben. I hope you're better?"

"Des tolerble, sah, des tolerble--" he paused and bowed to Phil. "An'
dis is you' school-mate at Wes' Pint, dey tells me about?"

"Yes, Uncle," Phil answered.

"I'se glad ter welcome yer ter Arlington, sah. And I'se powerful sorry
I ain't able ter be in de big house ter see dat yer git ebry thing ter
make yer happy, sah. Dese here young niggers lak Sam do pooty well. But
dey ain't got much sense, sah. And dey ain't got no unction'tall. Dey do
de best dey kin an' dat ain't much."

"Oh, I'm having a fine time, Uncle Ben," Phil assured him.

"Praise de Lord, sah."

"Sam told me you wanted to see me, Uncle Ben," Custis said.

"'Bout sumfin mos' particular, sah--"

"At your service."

The old man waved to his wife to look after the boys' breakfast.

"Pile dem fish up on der plates, Hannah. Fill 'em up--fill'em up!"

"We're mos' full now!" Robbie shouted.

"No we ain't," John protested. "I jis begun."

Ben led the young master and his friend out the back door, past the long
pile of cord wood, past the chicken yard to a strong box which he had
built on tall legs under a mulberry tree. It was constructed of oak and
the neatly turned gable roof was covered with old tin carefully painted
with three coats of red. A heavy hasp, staple and padlock held the solid
door.

Ben fumbled in his pocket, drew forth his keys and opened it. The box
was his fireproof and ratproof safe in which the old man kept his
valuables. His money, his trinkets, his hammer and nails, augur and
bits, screwdriver and monkeywrench. From the top shelf he drew a tin
can. A heavy piece of linen tied with a string served as a cover.

He carefully untied the string in silence. He shook the can. The boys
saw that it was filled with salt of the coarse kind used to preserve
meats.

Ben felt carefully in the salt, drew forth a shriveled piece of dark
gristle, and held it up before his young master.

"Yer know what dat is, Marse Custis?"

Custis shook his head.

From the old man's tones of deep emotion he knew the matter was serious.
He thought at once of the Hoodoo. But he could make out no meaning to
this bit of preserved flesh.

"Never saw anything like it."

"Nasah. I spec yer didn't."

Ben pushed the gray hair back from his left ear. He wore his hair drawn
low over the tips of his ears. It was a fad of his, which he never
allowed to lapse.

"See anything funny 'bout de top o' dat year, sah?"

Custis looked carefully.

"It looks shorter--"

"Hit's er lot shorter. De top ob hit's clean gone, sah. Dat's why I
allus combs my ha'r down close over my years--"

He paused and held up the piece of dried flesh.

"An' dat's hit, sah."

"A piece of your ear?"

"Hit sho is. Ye see, sah, a long time ergo when I wuz young an' strong
ez er bull, one er dese here uppish niggers come ter our house drivin'
a carriage frum Westover on de James, an' 'gin ter brag 'bout his folks
bein' de bes' blood er ole Virginia. An' man I tells him sumfin. I tells
dat fool nigger dat de folks at Westover wuz des fair ter midlin. Dat
_our_ folks wuz, an' allus wuz, de very fust fambly o' Virginy! I tells
him, dat Marse Robert's father was General Light Horse Harry Lee dat
help General Washington wid de Revolution. Dat he wuz de Govenor o' ole
Virginy. Dat he speak de piece at de funeral o' George Washington, dat
we all knows by heart, now--

"'Fust in war, fust in peace and fust in de hearts o' his countrymen.'

"I tells him dat Marse Robert's mother wuz a Carter. I tells him dat he
could count more dan one hundred gemmen his kin. Dat his folks allus had
been de very fust fambly in Virginy. I tells him dat he marry my Missis,
de gran' daughter o' ole Gineral Washington his-salf--an' en--"

He paused.

"An' den, what ye reckon dat fool nigger say ter me?"

"Couldn't guess."

"He say General Washington nebber had no children. And den man, man,
when he insult me lak dat, I jump on him lak a wil' cat. We fought an'
we fit. We fit an' we fought. I got him down an' bit one o' his years
clean off smooth wid his head. In de las' clinch he git hol' er my lef
year a'fo' I could shake him, he bit de top of hit off, sah. I got him
by the froat an' choke hit outen his mouf. And dar hit is, sah."

He held up the dried piece of his ear reverently.

"And what do you want me to do with it, Uncle Ben?" Custis asked
seriously.

"Nuttin right now, sah. But I ain't got long ter live--"

"Oh, you'll be well in a few days, Uncle Ben."

"I mought an' den agin I moughtent. I been lyin' awake at night worryin'
'bout dat year o' mine. Ye see hit wouldn't do tall fur me ter go
walkin' dem golden streets up dar in Heben wid one o' my years lopped
off lake a shoat er a calf dat's been branded. Some o' dem niggers
standin' on dat gol' sidewalk would laugh at me. An' dat would hurt my
feelin's. Some smart Aleck would be sho ter holler, 'Dar come ole Ben.
But he ain't got but one year!' Dat wouldn't do, tall, sah."

Phil bit his lips to keep from laughing. He saw the thing was no joke
for the old man. It was a grim tragedy.

"What I wants ter axe, Marse Custis, is dat you promise me faithful, ez
my young master, dat when I die you come to me, get dis year o' mine
outen dis salt box an' stick hit back right whar it b'long 'fore dey
nail me up in de coffin. I des can't 'ford ter walk down dem golden
streets, 'fore all dat company, wid a piece er my year missin'. Will ye
promise me, sah?"

Custis grasped the outstretched hand and clasped it.

"I promise you, Uncle Ben, faithfully."

"Den hit's all right, sah. When a Lee make a promise, hit's des ez good
ez done. I know dat case I know who I'se er talkin' to."

He placed the piece of gristle back into the tin can, covered it with
salt, tied the linen cover over it carefully, put it back on the shelf,
locked the heavy oak door and handed Custis the key.

"I got annudder key. You keep dat one, please, sah."

Custis and Phil left the old man more cheerful than he had been for
days.



CHAPTER VII


As the sun was sinking across the gray waters of the river, reflecting
in its silver surface a riot of purple and scarlet, the master of
Arlington sat in thoughtful silence holding the fateful Book of the
Slave in his hand. He had promised his friend, Edmund Ruffin, to give
him an answer early next week as to a public statement.

He was puzzled as to his duty. To his ready protest that he was not a
politician his friend had instantly replied that his word would have ten
times the weight for that reason. So deep was his brooding he did not
notice the two boys in a heated argument at the corner of the house.

Robbie Lee had drawn his barefoot friend, John, thus far. He had balked
and refused to go farther.

"Come on, John," Robbie pleaded.

"I'm skeered."

"Scared of what?"

"Colonel Lee."

"Didn't you come to see him?"

"I thought I did."

"Well, didn't ye?"

"Yes."

"Come on, then!"

"No--"

"What you scared of him for?"

"He's a great man."

"But he's my Papa."

"He don't want to be bothered with little boys."

"Yes, he does, too. He hears everything I've got to say to him."

"Ain't you skeered of him?"

"No!"

Robbie seized John's hand again and before he could draw back dragged
him to his father's side.

Lee turned the friendliest smile on John's flushed face and won his
confidence before a word was spoken.

"Well, Robbie, what's your handsome little friend's name?"

"John Doyle, Papa."

"Your father lives on the farm just outside our gate, doesn't he?"

"Yessir," the boy answered eagerly.

His embarrassment had gone. But it was hard to begin his story. It had
seemed easy at first, the need was so great. Now it seemed that he had
no right to make the request he had in his heart.

He hung his head and dug his big toe in the gravel.

Robbie hastened to his rescue.

"John wants to tell you something, Papa," he began tenderly.

"All right," Lee cheerfully answered as he drew one boy within each arm
and hugged them both. "What can I do for you, Johnnie?"

"I dunno, sir. I hope you can do somethin'."

"I will, if I can. I like to do things for boys. I was a little boy once
myself and I know exactly how it feels. What is it?"

Again the child hesitated.

Lee studied the lines of his finely molded face and neck and throat. A
handsomer boy of ten he had never seen. He pressed his arm closer and
held him a moment until he looked up with a tear glistening in his blue
eyes.

"Tell me, sonny--"

"My Ma's been cryin' all day, sir, and I want to do somethin' to help
her--"

He paused and his voice failed.

"What has she been crying about?"

"We've lost our home, sir, and my daddy's drunk."

"You've lost your home?"

"Yessir. The sheriff come this mornin'. And he's goin' to put us out.
Ma's most crazy. I ain't been a very good boy here lately--"

"No?"

"No, sir. I've been runnin' away and goin' fishin' and hurtin' my Ma's
feelin's and now I wish I hadn't done it. I heard her sayin' this
mornin' while she wuz cryin', that you wuz the only man she knowed on
earth who could help us. She was afeared to come to see you. And I
slipped out to tell ye. I thought if I could get you to come to see us,
maybe you could tell Ma what to do and that would make up for my hurtin'
her so when I run away from my lessons this week."

The Colonel gently pressed the boys away and rose with quick decision.

"I'll ride right up, sonny, and see your mother."

"Will you, Colonel Lee?" the child asked with pathetic eagerness.

"Just as soon as I can have my horse saddled."

Lee turned abruptly into the house and left the boy dazed. He threw his
arms around Robbie, hugged him in a flash and was gone. Up the dusty way
to the gate the little bare feet flew to tell glad tidings to a lonely
woman.

She stood beside the window looking out on the wreck of her life in a
stupor of wordless pain. She saw her boy leap the fence as a hound and
rushed from the house in alarm to meet him.

He was breathless, but he managed to gasp his message.

"Ma--Ma--Colonel Lee's comin' to see you!"

"To see me?"

"Yes'm. I told him we'd lost our home and he said he'd come right up.
And he's comin', too--"

The mother looked into the child's flushed face, saw the love light in
his eyes and caught him to her heart.

"Oh, boy, boy, you're such a fine young one--my baby--as smart as a
whip. You'll beat 'em all some day and make your poor old mother proud
and happy."

"I'm going to try now, Ma--you see if I don't."

"I know you will, my son."

"I'll never run away again. You see if I do."

The boy stopped suddenly at the sight of Colonel Lee swiftly
approaching.

"Run and wash your face," the mother whispered, "and tell your brothers
to put on clean shirts. I want them to see the Colonel, too."

The boy darted into the house.

The woman looked about the yard to see if there were any evidences of
carelessness. She had tried to keep it clean. The row of flowers that
flamed in the beds beside the door was the finest in the county. She
knew that. She was an expert in the culture of the prolific tall cosmos
that blooms so beautifully in the Indian summers of Old Virginia.

A cur dog barked.

"Get under the house, sir!" she commanded.

The dog continued to look down the road at the coming horseman.

"Get under the house, I say--" she repeated and the dog slowly obeyed.

She advanced to meet her visitor. He hitched his horse to a swinging
limb outside the gate and hurried in.

No introduction was necessary. The Colonel had known her husband for
years and he had often lifted his hat to his wife in passing.

He extended his hand and grasped hers in quick sympathy.

"I'm sorry to learn of your great misfortune from your fine boy, Mrs.
Doyle."

The woman's eyes filled with tears in spite of her firm resolution to be
dignified.

"He _is_ a fine--boy--isn't he, Colonel?"

"One of the handsomest little chaps I ever saw. You should be proud of
him."

"I am, sir."

She drew her figure a bit higher instinctively. The movement was not
lost on the keen observer of character. He had never noticed before the
distinction of her personality. In a simple calico dress, and forty
years of age, she presented a peculiarly winsome appearance. Her
features were regular, and well rounded, the coloring of cheeks and
neck and hands the deep pink of perfect health. Her eyes were a bright
glowing brown. They were large, soulful eyes that spoke the love of a
mother. She might scold her husband if provoked. But those eyes could
never scold a child. They could only love him into obedience and
helpfulness. They were shining mother eyes.

Lee studied her in a quick glance before speaking. He knew instinctively
that he could trust her word.

"Is there anything I can do, Mrs. Doyle?"

"Oh, I hope so, sir. My man's gone all to pieces to-day. He's
good-hearted and kind if I do have to say it myself. But when the
sheriff come to put us out, he just flopped and quit. And then he got
drunk. I don't blame him much. If I hadn't been a woman and the mother
of three fine boys and two as pretty little gals as the Lord ever give
to a woman, I reckon I'd a got drunk, too."

She stopped, overcome with emotion and Lee hastened to ask:

"How did it happen, Mrs. Doyle?"

"Well, sir, you see, we hadn't quite paid for the place. You know it's
hard with a big family of children on a little farm o' ten acres. It's
hard to make a livin' let alone save money to pay for the land. But we
wuz doin' it. We didn't have but two more payments to make when my man
signed a note for his brother. His brother got sick and couldn't pay
and they come down on us and we're turned out o' house and home. The
sheriff's give us till Wednesday to get out and we've nowhere to go--"

A sob caught her voice.

"Don't say that, Madame. No neighbor of mine will ever be without a home
so long as I have a house with a roof on it."

"Thank you, Colonel Lee," she interrupted, "but you know I can't let my
man be a renter and see my husband and my sons workin' other people's
land like nigger slaves. I got pride. I jus' can't do it. I'd rather
starve."

"I understand, Madame," Lee answered.

The two older boys came awkwardly out into the yard. One of them was
fourteen years old and the other sixteen.

The mother beckoned and they came to her with embarrassed step. Her face
lighted with pride in their stalwart figures and well-shaped, regular
features.

"Here's my oldest boy, William, Colonel Lee."

The Colonel took the outstretched hand with cordial grasp.

"I'm glad to know you, young man."

"And glad to see you, sir," he stammered, blushing.

"My next boy Drury, sir. He ain't but fourteen but he's a grown man."

Drury flushed red but failed to make a sound.

When they had moved away and leaned against the fence watching the scene
out of the corner of an eye, the mother turned to the Colonel and asked:

"Do you blame me if I'm proud of my boys, Colonel?"

"I do not, Madame."

"The Lord made me a mother. All I know is to raise fine children and
love 'em. My little gals is putty as dolls."

John suddenly appeared beside her and pulled her skirt.

"What's the matter?" she whispered.

"Pa's waked up. I told him Colonel Lee's here and he's washed his face
and walks straight. Shall I fetch him out, too?"

"Yes, run tell him to come quick."

The boy darted back into the house.

"Johnnie's father wants to see you, Colonel Lee," the woman apologized.

"I'll be glad to talk to him, Madame."

"He'll be all right now. Your comin' to see us'll sober him. He'll be
awful proud of the honor, sir."

Doyle emerged from the house and walked quickly toward the Colonel.
His head was high. He smiled a welcome to his guest and his step was
straight, light and springing, as if he were not quite sure he could
rest his full weight on one foot and tried to get them both down at the
same time.

Lee's face was a mask of quiet dignity. The tragedy in the woman's heart
made the more pathetic the comedy of the half-drunken husband. Besides,
he was philosopher enough to know that more than half the drunkenness of
the world was the pitiful effort to smother a heartache.

The man's smile was a peculiarly winning one. His face was covered with
a full growth of blond beard cut moderately long. He never shaved. His
wife trimmed his beard in the manner most becoming to the shape of his
head, the poise of his neck and evenly formed shoulders. He wore his
hair full long and it curled about his neck in a deep blond wave. He
might have posed for the model of Hoffman's famous picture of Christ.
His eyes, a clear blue, were the finest feature of his personality. In
spite of his lack of education, in spite of his shabby clothes, in spite
of the smell of liquor he was a personality. His clean, high forehead,
his aquiline nose, his straight eyebrows, his fair skin, his tall figure
spoke the heritage of the great Nordic race of men. The race whose
leaders achieved the civilization of Rome, conquered Europe and finally
dominated civilization.

The difference between this man and the leader who wore the uniform of
a Colonel was not in racial stock. It was purely an accident of the
conditions of birth and training. Behind Lee lay two hundred years of
wealth and culture. The poorer man was his kinsman of the centuries. The
world had not been kind to him. He had lost the way of material success.
Perhaps some kink in his mind, a sense of comedy, a touch of the old
wanderlust of the ages.

Lee wondered what had kept him poor as he looked at the figure
approaching. It was straight and fine in spite of the liquor.

Doyle's brain was just clear enough to realize that he had been highly
honored in a call from the foremost citizen of Virginia. His politeness
was extreme. And it was true. It was instinctive. It leaped from
centuries of racial inheritance.

"We're proud of the honor you've done us, Colonel Lee," he announced.

He grasped the extended hand with a cordial, dignified greeting.

"I only hope I can be of some service to you and your family, Mr.
Doyle."

"I'm sure you can, sir. Won't you come in, Colonel?"

"Thank you, it's so pleasant outside, we'll just sit down by the well,
if you don't mind."

"Yessir. All right, sir."

Lee moved slowly toward the platform of the well with its old oaken
bucket and tall sweep.

His wife threw a warning at her husband under her breath.

"Don't you say nothin' foolish now--"

"I won't."

"Your tongue's too long when it gets to waggin'."

"I'll mind, Ma," he smiled.

The woman called softly to her distinguished guest:

"You'll excuse me, Colonel, while I look after the supper. I'll be back
in a minute."

"Certainly, Madame."

He could not have bowed with graver courtesy to the wife of Stephen A.
Douglas.

"Have a seat here on the well, Colonel," Doyle invited.

Lee took his seat on the weather-beaten oak boards.

Doyle turned his foot on a rounded stone and set down a little
ungracefully in spite of his effort to be fully himself. He saw at once
his misstep and hastened to apologize.

"I'm sorry, Colonel, you've caught me with the smell of liquor, sir--"

He paused and looked over his garden in an embarrassed way.

"I know what has happened to you, Mr. Doyle, and you have my deepest
sympathy."

"Thank you, sir."

"I might have done the same thing if I'd been in your position. Though,
of course, liquor won't help things for you."

Doyle smiled around the corners of his blue eyes.

"No, sir, except while it's a swimmin' in the veins. Then for a little
while you're great and rich and you don't care which a way the wind
blows."

"The farm is lost beyond hope?"

"Yessir, clean gone--world without end."

"You had a lawyer?"

"The best in the county, old Jim Randolph. I didn't have no money to pay
him. He said we'd both always voted the Whig ticket and he'd waive his
retainer. I didn't know what he was wavin', but anyhow he tuck my case.
And I will say he put up a nasty fight for me. He made one of the
greatest speeches I ever heared in my life. Hit wuz mighty nigh worth
losin' the farm ter hear him tell how I'd been abused and how fine a
feller I wuz. An' when he los' the case, he cussed the Judge, he cussed
the jury, he cussed the lawyers. He swore they was all fools and didn't
know the first principles er law nohow. I sho enjoyed the fight, ef I
did lose it. I couldn't pay him nothin' yet. But I did manage to get him
a gallon of the best apple brandy I ever tasted."

"What do you think of doing?"

"I ain't had time ter think, sir. I don't think fast nohow and the first
thing I had to do when I come home and tole the ole 'oman and she bust
out cryin'--wuz ter get drunk. Somehow I couldn't stand it."

"You've never learned a trade?"

"No sir--nothin' 'cept farmin'. I said to myself--what's the use? These
damned nigger slaves have learned all the trades. They say in the old
days, they wuz just servants in the house and stables, and field hands.
Now they've learnt _all_ the trades. They're mechanics, blacksmiths,
carpenters, wagon makers and everything. What chance has a poor white
man got agin 'em? They don't have to worry about nothin'. They have
everything they need before they lift their hands to do anything. They
got plenty to eat for themselves and their families, no matter how many
children they have. All they can eat, all they can wear, a warm house
and a big fire in the winter. I have to fight and scratch to keep a roof
over my head, wood in my fireplace, clothes on my back and somethin' to
eat on my table. How can I beat the slave at a trade? Tain't no use to
try. Ef you want to build a house, your own carpenters can do it. And if
you haven't enough slave carpenters of your own, your neighbors have.
They can hire 'em to you cheaper than I can work and live. They're goin'
to _live_ anyhow. That's settled because they're slaves. They're worth
twelve hundred dollars apiece. Their life is precious. Mine don't count.
I got to look after that myself and I got to look after my wife and
children, too. Hit ain't right, Colonel, this Slavery business. You know
that as well as I do. I've heard you say it, too--"

"I agree with you, Mr. Doyle. But if we set them all free to-morrow, and
you had to compete with their labor, you couldn't live down to their
standard of wages, could you?"

"No, I couldn't. They would kill me at that game, too. That's why I hate
a free nigger worse than a slave--"

He paused and his face knotted with fury.

"Damn 'em all--why are they here anyhow?"

"Come, come, my friend," Lee protested. "It doesn't help to swear about
it. They _are_ here. Not by any wish of mine or of yours. We inherited
this curse from the past. We have clung to old delusions while our smart
Yankee friends have shifted the responsibilities on others."

"What _can_ I do, Colonel?" Doyle asked desperately. "I don't know how
to do anything but farm. I can't go into the fields and work with slaves
as a field hand. And I couldn't get such work to do if I'd do it. I'll
die before I'll come down to it. I might rent a little farm alongside of
a free nigger. But he can beat me at that game. He can live on less and
work longer hours than I do. He'll underbid me as a cropper. He can live
and pay the owner four-fifths of the crop. I'd starve. What am I goin'
to do?"

"Had you thought of moving West into one of the new Territories just
opening?"

"Yessir. I'd thought of it. But how am I goin' to get there with a wife
and five children?"

Lee rose and looked about the place thoughtfully.

"How much could you realize from the sale of your things?"

Doyle scratched his head doubtfully.

"I ain't got no idee, sir. I'm afraid not much. Ye see it's just home
stuff. The old 'oman's awful smart. She raises enough chickens and
turkeys and ducks and guineas to eat, and she sells a few eggs and young
chickens and turkeys when they brings anything in the market. I got six
sheep, a cow, a calf, a mule, a couple o' pigs in the pen. But they
won't bring much money. Ye see I never felt so poor ez long ez I had a
_home_ where I can live independent like. That house ain't much, sir.
But you ain't no idea how deep down in my heart it's got."

He paused and looked at it. The Colonel followed his gaze. It was a
small frame structure standing in a yard filled with trees. A one-story
affair with a sharp, gabled attic. Two dormer windows projected from
the high roof and a solid brick chimney at each end gave it dignity. A
narrow porch came straight out from the front door. On either side of
the porch were built wooden benches and behind them on a lattice grew
a luxuriant rambler rose. It was still blooming richly in the warm
September sun.

"Ye see, sir," Doyle went on, "what we've got that's worth havin' can't
be sold. I love the smell o' them roses. I wake up in the night and the
breeze brings it in the window and it puts me to sleep like an old song
my mother used to sing when I was a little shaver--"

He stopped short.

"I didn't mean to snivel, sir."

"I understand, my friend. No apologies are necessary."

"And that big scuppernong grape vine out there in the garden--I couldn't
sell that. I planted it fifteen years ago. Folks told us we was too fur
north here fur it to grow good. But I knowed better. You can see its
covered a place as big ez the house. And you can smell them ripe grapes
a hundred yards before ye get to the gate. I make a little wine outen
'em. We have 'em to eat a whole month. That garden keeps us goin' winter
and summer. You see them five rows of flat turnips and the ruttabaggers
beside 'em? I've cabbage enough banked under them pine tops to make a
fifty-gallon barrel o' kraut and give us cabbage with our bacon all
winter. We've got turnip greens, onions and collards. I've got corn and
wheat in my crib and bacon enough to last me till next year. I raise
the finest watermelons and mushmelons in the county and it ain't much
trouble to live here. I never knowed how well off I wuz till the Sheriff
come and told me I had to go."

"You're in the prime of life. You can go to a new country and begin over
again. Why not?"

"If I could get there. I reckon I could."

He stopped short as his wife appeared by his side. She had heard Colonel
Lee's last question.

"Of course, you can begin over again. Haven't we got three of the finest
boys the Lord ever give a mother? They ain't got no chance here nohow.
My baby boy's one o' the smartest youngsters in the county. Ef old Andy
Jackson wuz a poor boy an' got ter be President, he might do the same
thing ef we give him a chance--"

"Yes, I reckon we could, ef we had a chance," Doyle agreed doubtfully.
"But it would be a hard pull to leave my ole Virginy home. You know that
would pull you, Colonel--now wouldn't it?"

"Yes, it would," was the earnest answer.

"You see I wuz born in this country an' me daddy before me. I like it
here. I like the feel of the air in the fall. There's a flock o' ducks
now circlin' over that bend o' the river. The geese are comin'. I heard
'em honk high up in the sky last night. I like my oysters and terrapin.
I like to shoot ducks and geese, rabbits and quail. I like the smell
o' the water. I like the smell o' these fields. I like the way the sun
shines and the winds blow down here. It's in my blood."

"But you'll go if you can get away," his wife interrupted cheerfully.

Two little girls timidly drew near. Their faces were washed clean and
their shining blonde hair gleamed in circles of golden light as the rays
of the setting sun caught it.

Lee smiled, took them both in his arms and kissed them.

A tear softened his eyes as he placed them on the ground.

"You're darling little dolls. No wonder your mother loves you."

"Run back in the house now, honeys," the mother said.

The children slowly obeyed, glancing back at the great man who had
kissed them. They wondered why their daddy hadn't kissed them oftener.

"What do you think we ought to do, Colonel Lee?" the woman asked
eagerly.

"I can tell you what I would do, Madame, in your place--"

"What?"

The husband and wife spoke the word in chorus.

"I'd go West and begin again."

"But how'm I goin' to get away, sir?" the man asked blankly.

"Sell your things for the best price you can get and I'll loan you the
balance of the money you'll need."

"Will you, sir?" the woman gasped.

"I ain't got no security for ye, Colonel--" Doyle protested.

"You are my friend and neighbor, Mr. Doyle. You're in distress. You
don't need security. I'll take your note, sir, without endorsement."

"Glory to God!" the mother cried with face uplifted in a prayer of
thanksgiving.

Doyle couldn't speak for a moment. He looked out over the roadway and
got control of his feelings before trying. There was a lump in his
throat which made his speech thick when at last he managed to grasp
Lee's hand.

"I dunno how to thank you, sir."

"It will be all right, Mr. Doyle. Look after the sale of your things and
I'll find out the best way for you to get there and let you know."

He mounted his horse and rode away into the fading sunset as they
watched him through dimmed eyes.



CHAPTER VIII


Lee had promised Edmund Ruffin his answer early in the week. Ruffin had
just ridden up the hill and dismounted.

Mrs. Marshall, the Colonel's sister, on a visit from Baltimore, fled at
his approach.

"Excuse me, Mary," she cried to Mrs. Lee. "I just can't stand these
ranting fire-eating politicians. They make me ill. I'll go to my room."

She hurried up the stairway and left the frail mistress of the house to
meet her formidable guest.

Ruffin was the product of the fierce Abolition Crusade. Hot-tempered,
impulsive, intemperate in his emotions and their expression, he was the
perfect counterpart of the men who were working night and day in the
North to create a condition of mob feeling out of which a civil conflict
might grow. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had set him on fire with new hatreds.
His vocabulary of profanity had been enlarged by the addition of every
name in the novel. He had been compelled to invent new expressions to
fit these characters. He damned them individually and collectively. He
cursed each trait of each character, good and bad. He cursed the good
points with equal unction and equal emphasis. In fact the good traits in
Mrs. Stowe's people seemed to carry him to greater heights of wrath and
profanity than the bad ones. He dissected each part of each character's
anatomy, damned each part, put the parts together and damned the
collection. And then he damned the whole story, characters, plot and
scenes to the lowest pit and cursed the devil for not building a lower
one to which he might consign it. And in a final burst of passion he
always ended by damning himself for his utter inability to express
_anything_ which he really felt.

With all his ugly language, which he reserved for conversation with men,
he was the soul of consideration for a woman. Mrs. Lee had no fear of
any rude expression from his lips. She didn't like him because she felt
in his personality the touch of mob insanity which the Slavery question
had kindled. She dreaded this appeal to blind instinct and belief. With
a woman's intuition she felt the tragic possibility of such leadership
North and South.

She saw his leonine head and shaggy hair silhouetted against the red
glow of the west with a shiver at its symbolism, but met him with the
cordial greeting which every Southern woman gave instinctively to the
friend of her husband.

"Come in, Mr. Ruffin," she welcomed.

He bowed over her hand and spoke in the soft drawl of the Southern
planter.

"Thank you, Madame. I'm greatly honored in having you greet me at the
door."

"Colonel Lee is expecting you."

The planter drew himself up with a touch of pride and importance.

"Yes'm. I sent him word I would be here at three. I was detained in
Washington. But I succeeded in convincing the editor of _The Daily
Globe_ that my mission was one of grave importance. I not only desire to
wish Colonel Lee God-speed on his journey to West Point and congratulate
him on the honor conferred on Virginia by his appointment to the command
of our Cadets--but--"

He paused, smiled and glanced toward the portico, as if he were holding
back an important secret.

Mrs. Lee hastened to put him at his ease.

"You can trust my discretion in any little surprise you may have for the
Colonel."

Ruffin bowed.

"I'm sure I can, Madame. I'm sure I can."

He dropped his voice.

"You know perhaps that I sent him a few days ago a scurrilous attack on
the South by a Yankee woman--a new novel?"

"He received it."

"Has he read it?"

"Carefully. He has read it twice."

"Good!"

The planter breathed deeply, squared his shoulders and paced the floor
with a single quick turn. He stopped before Mrs. Lee and spoke in sharp
emphasis.

"I'm going to spring a little surprise on the public, Madame! A
sensation that will startle the country, and God knows we need a little
shaking just now--"

He paused and whispered.

"I'm so sure of what the Colonel will say that I've brought a reporter
from the Washington _Daily Globe_ with me--"

Mrs. Lee lifted her hand in dismay.

"He is here?"

"He is seated on the lawn just outside, Madame," Ruffin hastened to
reassure her. "I thought at the last moment I'd better have him wait
until I received Colonel Lee's consent to the interview."

"I'm glad you did."

"Oh, it will be all right, I assure you!"

"He might not wish to see a reporter--"

"So I told the young man."

"I'm afraid--"

"I'll pave the way, Madame. I'll pave the way. Colonel Lee and I are
life-long friends. Will you kindly announce me?"

"The Colonel has just ridden up to the stables to give some orders about
his horses. He'll be here in a moment."

Lee stepped briskly into the room and extended his hand.

"It's you, Ruffin. My apologies. I was called out to see a neighbor. I
should have been here to receive you."

"No apologies, Colonel, Mrs. Lee has been most gracious."

The mistress of the house smiled.

"Make yourself at home, Mr. Ruffin. I shall hope to see you at dinner."

Ruffin stood respectfully until Mrs. Lee had disappeared.

"Pray be seated," Lee invited.

Ruffin seated himself on the couch and watched his host keenly.

Lee took a cigar from the mantel and offered it.

"A cigar, Ruffin?"

"Thanks."

"Now make yourself entirely at home, my good friend."

The planter lighted the cigar, blew a long cloud of smoke and settled in
his seat.

"I'm glad to learn from Mrs. Lee that you have read the book I sent
you--the Abolitionist firebrand."

"Yes."

Lee quietly walked to the mantel and got the volume.

"I have it here."

He turned the leaves thoughtfully.

Ruffin laughed.

"And, what do you think of it?"

The Colonel was silent a moment.

"Well, for those who like that kind of book--it's the kind of book they
will like."

"Exactly!" Ruffin cried, slapping his knee with a blow that bruised it.
"And you're the man in all the South to tell the fool who likes that
sort of book just how big a fool he is!"

Lee opened the volume again and turned the pages slowly.

"Ruffin, I don't read many novels--"

He paused as if in deep study.

"But this one I have read twice."

"I'm glad you did, sir," the planter snapped.

"And I must confess it stunned me."

"Stunned you?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"When I finished reading it, I felt like the overgrown boy who stubbed
his toe. It hurt too bad to laugh. And I'm too big to cry."

"You amaze me, sir."

"That's the way I feel, my friend."

He paused, walked to the window, and gazed out at the first lights that
began to flicker in the windows of the Capitol across the river.

"That book," he went on evenly, "is an appeal to the heart of the world
against Slavery. It is purely an appeal to sentiment, to the emotions,
to passion, if you will--the passions of the mob and the men who lead
mobs. And it's terrible. As terrible as an army with banners. I heard
the throb of drums through its pages. It will work the South into a
frenzy. It will make millions of Abolitionists in the North who could
not be reached by the coarser methods of abuse. It will prepare the soil
for a revolution. If the right man appears at the right moment with a
lighted torch--"

"That's just why, sir, as the foremost citizen of Virginia, you must
answer this slander. I have brought a reporter from the _Globe_ with me
for that purpose. Shall I call him,"

"A reporter from a daily paper with a circulation of fifteen thousand?"

"Your word, Colonel Lee, will be heard at this moment to the ends of the
earth, sir!"

"In a newspaper interview?"

"Yes, sir."

"Nonsense."

"It's your character that will count."

"Such an answer would be a straw pitched against a hurricane. I am told
that this book has already reached a circulation of half a million
copies and it has only begun. That means already three million readers.
To answer this book my pen should be better trained than my sword--"

"It is, sir, if you'll only use it."

"The South has only trained swords. And not so many of them as we think.
We have no writers. We have no literature. We have no champions in the
forum of the world's thought. We are being arraigned at the judgment bar
of mankind and we are dumb. It's appalling."

"That's why you must speak for us. Speak in our defense. Speak with a
tongue of flame--"

"I am not trained for speech, Ruffin. And the pen is mightier than the
sword. I've never realized it before. The South will soon have the
civilized world arraigned against her. The North with a thousand pens is
stirring the faiths, the prejudices and the sentiments of the millions.
This appeal is made in the face of History, Reason and Law. But its
force will be as the gravitation of the earth, beyond the power of
resistance, unless we can check it in time."

"When it comes to resistance," Ruffin snapped, "that's another question.
The Yankees are a race of damned cowards and poltroons, sir. They won't
fight."

Lee shook his head gravely.

"I've been in the service more than a quarter of a century, my friend.
I've seen a lot of Yankees under fire. I've seen a lot of them die. And
I know better. Your idea of a Yankee is about as correct as the Northern
notion of Southern fighters. A notion they're beginning to exploit in
cartoons which show an effeminate lady killer with an umbrella stuck in
the end of his musket and a negro mixing mint juleps for him."

"We've got to denounce those slanders. I'm a man of cool judgment and I
never lose my temper--"

He leaped to his feet purple with rage.

"But, by God, sir, we can't sit quietly under the assault of these
narrow-minded bigots. You must give the lie to this infamous book!"

"How can I, my friend?"

"Doesn't she make heroes of law breakers?"

"Surely."

"Is there no reverence for law left in this country?"

"In Courts of Justice, yes. But not in the courts of passion, prejudice,
beliefs, sentiment. The writers of sentiment sing the praises of law
breakers--"

"But there can be no question of the right or wrong of this book. It is
an infamous slander. I deny and impeach it!"

"I'm afraid that's all we can do, Ruffin--deny and impeach it. When we
come down to brass tacks we can't answer it. From their standpoint the
North is right. From our standpoint we are right, because our rights are
clear under the Constitution. Slavery is not a Southern institution; it
is a national inheritance. It is a national calamity. It was written
into the Constitution by all the States, North and South. And if the
North is ignorant of our rights under the laws of our fathers, we have
failed to enlighten them--"

"We won't be dictated to, sir, by a lot of fanatics and hypocrites."

"Exactly, we stand on our dignity. We deny and we are ready to fight.
But we will not argue. As an abstract proposition in ethics or
economics, Slavery does not admit of argument. It is a curse. It's on
us and we can't throw it off at once. My quarrel with the North is
that they do not give us their sympathy and their help in our dilemma.
Instead they rave and denounce and insult us. They are even more
responsible than we for the existence of Slavery, since their ships, not
ours, brought the negro to our shores. Slavery is an outgrown economic
folly, a bar to progress, a political and social curse to the white
race. It must die of its own weakness, South, as it died of its own
weakness, North. It is now in the process of dying. The South has freed
over three hundred thousand slaves by the voluntary act of the master.
If these appeals of the mob leader to the spirit of the mob can be
stopped, a solution will be found."

"It will never be found in the ravings of Abolitionists."

"Nor in the hot tempers of our Southern partisans, Ruffin. Look in
the mirror, my good friend. Chattel Slavery is doomed because of the
superior efficiency of the wage system. Morals have nothing to do with
it. The Captain of Industry abolished Chattel Slavery in the North, not
the preacher or the agitator. He established the wage system in its
place because it is a mightier weapon in his hand. It is subject to but
one law. The iron law of supply and demand. Labor is a commodity to be
bought and sold to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder is at
liberty to bid lower than the price of bread, clothes, fuel and shelter,
if he chooses. This system is now moving Southward like a glacier from
the frozen heart of the Northern mountains, eating all in its path. It
is creeping over Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri. It will slowly engulf
Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee and the end is sure. Its
propelling force is not moral. It is soulless. It is purely economic.
The wage earner, driven by hunger and cold, by the fear of the loss of
life itself--is more efficient in his toil than the care-free negro
slave of the South, who is assured of bread, of clothes, of fuel and
shelter, with or without work. Slavery does not admit of argument, my
friend. To argue about it is to destroy it."

"I disagree with you, sir!" Ruffin thundered.

"I know you do. But you can't answer this book."

"It can be answered, sir."

Lee paced the floor, his arms folded behind his back, paused and watched
Ruffin's flushed face. He shook his head again.

"The book is unanswerable, because it is an appeal to emotion based on a
study of Slavery in the abstract. If no allowance be made for the tender
and humane character of the Southern people or the modification of
statutory law by the growth of public sentiment, its imaginary scenes
are within the bounds of the probable. The story is crude, but it is
told with singular power without a trace of bitterness. The blind
ferocity of Garrison, who sees in every slaveholder a fiend, nowhere
appears in its pages. On the other hand, Mrs. Stowe has painted one
slaveholder as gentle and generous. Simon Legree, her villain, is a
Yankee who has moved South and taken advantage of the power of a master
to work evil. Such men have come South. Such things might be done. It
is precisely this possibility that makes Slavery indefensible. You know
this. And I know it."

"You astound me, Colonel."

"Yes, I'm afraid I do. I'd like to speak a message to the South about
this book. I've a great deal more to say to my own people than to our
critics."

Ruffin rose, thrust his hands in his pockets, walked to the window,
turned suddenly and faced his host.

"But look here, Colonel Lee, I'm damned if I can agree with you, sir!
Suppose Slavery _is_ wrong--an economic fallacy and a social evil--I
don't say it is, mind you. Just suppose for the sake of argument that it
is. We don't propose to be lectured on this subject by our inferiors in
the North. The children of the men who stole these slaves from Africa
and sold them to us at a profit!"

Lee laughed softly.

"The sins of an inferior cannot excuse the mistakes of a superior. The
man of superior culture and breeding should lead the world in progress.
What has come over us in the South, Ruffin? Your father and mine never
defended Slavery. They knew it was to them, their children and this
land, a curse. It was a blessing only to the savage who was being taught
the rudiments of civilization at a tremendous cost to his teacher. The
first Abolition Societies were organized in the South. Washington,
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Randolph, all the great leaders of the
old South, the men whose genius created this republic--all denounced
Slavery. They told us that it is a poison, breeding pride and tyranny
of character, that it corrupts the mind of the child, that it degrades
labor, wears out our land, destroys invention, and saps our ideal of
liberty. And yet we have begun to defend it."

"Because we are being hounded, traduced and insulted by the North,
yes--"

"Yes, but also because we must have more land."

"We've as much right in the West as the North."

"That's not the real reason we demand the right of entry. We are
exhausting the soil of the South by our slipshod farming on great
plantations where we use old-fashioned tools and slave labor. We refuse
to study history. Ancient empires tried this system and died. The
Carthagenians developed it to perfection and fell before the Romans. The
Romans borrowed it from Carthage. It destroyed the small farms and drove
out the individual land owners. It destroyed respect for trades and
crafts. It strangled the development of industrial art. And when the
test came Roman civilization passed. You hot-heads under the goading of
Abolition crusaders now blindly propose to build the whole structure of
Southern Society on this system."

"We've no choice, sir."

"Then we must find one. Slowly but surely the clouds gather for the
storm. We catch only the first rumblings now but it's coming."

Ruffin flared.

"Now listen to me, Colonel. I'm a man of cool judgment and I never lose
my temper, sir--"

He choked with passion, recovered and rushed on.

"If they ever dare attack us, we won't need _writers_. We'll draw our
swords and thrash them! The South is growing rich and powerful."

Lee lifted his hand in a quick gesture of protest.

"A popular delusion, my friend. Under Slave labor the South is growing
poorer daily. While the Northern States, under the wage system, ten
times more efficient, are draining the blood and treasure of Europe and
growing richer by leaps and bounds. Norfolk, Richmond and Charleston
should have been the great cities of the Eastern Seaboard. They are as
yet unimportant towns in the world commerce. Boston, Philadelphia and
New York have become the centers of our business life, of our trade, our
culture, our national power. While slavery is scratching the surface of
our soil with old-fashioned plows, while we quit work at twelve o'clock
every Saturday, spend our Sundays at church, and set two negroes to
help one do nothing Monday morning, the North is sweeping onward in the
science of agriculture. While they invent machines which double their
crops, cut their labor down a hundred per cent, we are fighting for new
lands in the West to exhaust by our primitive methods. The treasures of
the earth yet lie in our mines untouched by pick or spade. Our forests
stand unbroken--vast reaches of wilderness. The slave is slow and
wasteful. Wage labor, quick, efficient. Our chief industry is the
breeding of a race of feverish politicians."

"You know, Colonel Lee, as well as I do that Slavery in the South has
been a blessing to the negro."

Lee moved his head in quick assent.

"I admit that Slavery took the negro from the jungle, from a slavery the
most cruel known to human history, that it has taught him the use of
tools, the science of agriculture, the worship of God, the first lessons
in the alphabet of humanity. But unless we can now close this school, my
friend, somebody is going to try to divide this Union some day--"

Ruffin struck his hands together savagely.

"The quicker the better, I say! If the children of the men who created
this republic are denied equal rights under its laws and in its
Territories, then I say, to your tents, oh, Israel!"

"And do you know what that may mean?"

"A Southern and a Northern Nation. Let them come!"

"The States have been knit together slowly, but inevitably by steam and
electricity. I can conceive of no greater tragedy than an attempt to-day
to divide them."

"I can conceive of no greater blessing!" Ruffin fairly shouted.

"So William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of Abolition, is saying in his
paper _The Liberator_. And, Ruffin, unless we can lock up some hot-heads
in the South and such fanatics as Garrison in the North, the mob, not
the statesman, is going to determine the laws and the policy of this
country. Somebody will try to divide the Union. And then comes the
deluge! When I think of it, the words of Thomas Jefferson ring through
my soul like an alarm bell in the night. 'I tremble for my country when
I reflect that God is just and that His justice cannot sleep forever.
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than these black
people shall be free--'"

Ruffin lifted his hand in a commanding gesture.

"Don't omit his next sentence, sir--'nor is it less certain, that the
two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government--'"

"Exactly," Lee answered solemnly. "And that is the only reason why I
have ever allowed myself to own a slave for a moment--the insoluble
problem of what to do with him when freed. The one excuse for Slavery
which the South can plead without fear before the judgment bar of God is
the blacker problem which their emancipation will create. Unless it can
be brought about in a miracle of patience, wisdom and prayer."

He paused and smiled at Ruffin's forlorn expression.

"Will you call your reporter now to take my views?"

"No, sir," the planter growled. "I've changed my mind."

The Colonel laughed softly.

"I thought you might."

Ruffin gazed in silence through the window at the blinking lights in
Washington, turned and looked moodily at his calm host. He spoke in a
slow, dreamy monotone, his eyes on space seeing nothing:

"Colonel Lee, this country is hell bent and hell bound. I can see no
hope for it."

Lee lifted his head with firm faith.

"Ruffin, this country is in God's hands--and He will do what's right--"

"That's just what I'm afraid, sir!" Ruffin mused. "Oh, no--I--don't mean
that exactly. I mean that we must anticipate--"

"The wisdom of God?"

"That we must prepare to meet our enemies, sir."

"I agree with you. And I'm going to do it. I've been doing a lot of
thinking and _soul_ searching since you gave me this troublesome book to
read--"

He stopped short, rose and drew the old-fashioned bell cord.

Ben appeared in full blue cloth and brass buttons, on duty again as
butler.

"Yassah--"

"I'm glad to see you, Ben. You're feeling yourself again?"

"Yassah. Praise God, I'se back at my place once mo', sah."

The master lifted his hand in warning.

"Take care of yourself now. No more risks. You're not as young as you
once were."

"Thankee, sah."

"Ask Mrs. Lee to bring me the document on my desk. Find Sam and fetch
him here."

Ben bowed.

"Yassah. Right away, sah."

Lee turned to his guest genially.

"I'm going to ask you to witness what I'm about to do, Ruffin. And
you mustn't take offense. We differ about Slavery and politics in the
abstract, but whatever our differences on the surface, you are an old
Virginia planter and I trust we shall always be friends."

The two men clasped hands and Ruffin spoke with deep emotion.

"I am honored in your friendship, Colonel Lee. However I may differ with
you about the Union, we agree on one thing, that the old Dominion is the
noblest state on which the sun has ever shown!"

Lee closed his eyes as if in prayer.

"On that we are one. Old Virginia, the mother of Presidents and of
states, as I leave her soil I humbly pray that God's blessings may ever
rest upon her!"

"So say I, sir," Ruffin responded heartily. "And I'll try to do the
cussin' for her while you do the praying."

Mrs. Lee entered and handed to her husband a folded document, as Ben
came from the kitchen with Sam, who bowed and grinned to every one in
the room.

Lee spoke in low tones to his wife.

"Ask the young people to come in for a moment, my dear."

Mrs. Lee crossed quickly to the library door and called:

"Come in, children, Colonel Lee wishes to see you all."

Mary, Stuart, Custis, Phil, Robbie and Sid pressed into the hall in
curious, expectant mood. Mrs. Marshall knew that Ruffin was still there,
but her curiosity got the better of her aversion. She followed the
children, only to run squarely into Ruffin.

He was about to speak in his politest manner when she stiffened and
passed him.

Ruffin's eye twinkled. He knew that she saw him. She hated him for
his political views. She also knew that he hated her husband, Judge
Marshall, with equal cordiality. His pride was too great to feel the
slightest hurt at her attempt to ignore him. She was a fanatic on the
subject of the Union. All right, he was a fanatic on the idea of an
independent South. They were even. Let it be so.

With a toss of his head, he turned toward Lee who had seated himself at
the table behind the couch.

The children were chatting and laughing as they entered. A sudden hush
fell on them as they caught the serious look on the Colonel's face. He
was writing rapidly. He stopped and fixed a seal on the paper which he
held in his hand. He read it carefully, lifted his eyes to the group
that had drawn near and said:

"Children, my good friend, Mr. Ruffin, has called to-day to bid us
God-speed on our journey North. And he has asked me to answer _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_. I've called you to witness the only answer I know how to
make at this moment."

He paused and turned toward Sam.

"Come here, Sam."

The young negro rolled his eyes in excited wonder about the room and
laughed softly at nothing as he approached the table.

"Yassah, Marse Robert."

"How old are you, Sam?"

"Des twenty, sah."

"I had meant to wait until you were twenty-one for this, but I have
decided to act to-day. You will arrange to leave here and go with us as
far as New York."

The negro bowed gratefully.

"Yassah, thankee sah, I sho did want ter go norf wid you, sah, but I
hated to axe ye."

Lee handed Sam the document.

"You will go with me a free man, my boy. You are the only slave I yet
hold in my own right. I have just given you your deed of emancipation.
From this hour you are your own master. May God bless you and keep you
in health and strength and give you long life and much happiness."

Sam stared at the paper and then at the kindly eyes of his old master. A
sob caught his voice as he stammered:

"May God bless you, Marse Robert--"

Ben lifted his hands in benediction and his voice rang in the solemn
cadence of the prophet and seer:

"And let the glory of His face shine upon him forever!"

Mrs. Marshall stooped and kissed her brother.

"You're a true son of Virginia, Robert, in this beautiful answer you
make to-day to all our enemies."

She rose and faced Ruffin with square antagonism.

Lee turned to the old butler.

"And Ben, tell all our servants of the estate that, under the will of
Mrs. Lee's father I will in due time set them free. I would do so to-day
if the will had not fixed the date."

Ben bowed gravely.

"I'se proud to be your servant, Marse Robert and Missis, and when
my freedom comes frum yo' hands, I'll be prouder still to serve you
always."

With head erect Ben proudly led the dazed young freedman from the hall
to the kitchen where his reception was one of mixed wonder and pity.

There fell a moment's awkward silence, broken at last by Stuart's clear,
boyish voice. He saw Ruffin's embarrassment. He knew the man's fiery
temper and wondered at his restraint.

"Well, Mr. Ruffin," Stuart began, "we may not see as clearly as Colonel
Lee to-day, but he's my commander, sir, and I'll say he's right."

Ruffin faced Lee with a look of uncompromising antagonism and fairly
shot his words.

"And for the millions of the South, I say he's wrong. There's a time
for all things. And this is not the time for such an act. From the
appearance of this book you can rest assured the emancipation of slaves
in the South will cease. We will never be bullied into freeing our
slaves by slander and insult. Colonel Lee's example will not be
followed. The fanatics of the North have begun to spit on our faces.
There's but one answer to an insult--and that's a blow!"

Lee stepped close to the planter, laid one hand gently on his shoulder,
searched his angry eyes for a moment and slowly said:

"And thrice is he armed, my friend, who hath his quarrel just. I set my
house in order before the first blow falls."

Ruffin smiled and threw off the ugly strain.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said with friendly indifference, "that my mission
has been a failure."

"And I'm sorry we can't agree."

"I won't be able to stay to dinner, Mrs. Lee, and I bid you all good
evening."

With a wave of his hand in a gesture behind which lurked the tingling of
taut nerves, he turned and left.

The beat of his horse's hoof echoed down the road with a sharp, angry
crack.



CHAPTER IX


On Sunday the whole plantation went to Church. The negroes sat in the
gallery and listened with rapt attention to the service. They joined its
ritual and its songs with their white folks in equal sincerity and more
profound emotion.

At the crossroads the stream of carriages, carts and buggies and
horseback riders parted. To the right, the way led to the Episcopal
Church, the old English establishment of the State, long since
separated from secular authority, yet still bearing the seal of county
aristocracy. Colonel Lee was a devout member of this church. Mrs. Lee
was the inspiration of its charities and the soul of its activities.

A few of the negroes of the estate attended it with the master and
mistress of Arlington. By far the larger number turned to the left at
the cross roads and found their way to the Antioch Baptist Church. The
simplicity of its service, the fervor of its singing, and above all
the emotional call of its revivals which swept the country each summer
appealed to the warm-hearted Africans. They took to the Baptist and
Methodist churches as ducks to water. The master made no objection to
the exercise of their right to worship God as their consciences called.
He encouraged their own preachers to hold weekly prayer meetings and
exhort his people in the assembling places of the servants.

Nor did he object to the dance which Sam, who was an Episcopalian,
invariably organized on the nights following prayer and exhortation.

This last Sunday was one of tender farewells to friends and neighbors.
They crowded about the Colonel after the services. They wished him
health and happiness and success in his new work.

The last greeting he got from an old bent neighbor of ninety years. It
brought a cloud to his brow. All day and into the night the thought
persisted and its shadow chilled the hours of his departure. James
Nelson was his name, of the ancient family of the Nelsons of Yorktown.

He held Lee's hand a long time and blinked at him with a pair of keen,
piercing eyes--keen from a spiritual light that burned within. He spoke
in painful deliberation as if he were translating a message.

"I am glad you are going to West Point, Colonel Lee. You will have time
for thinking. You will have time to study the art of war as great minds
must study it alone if they lead armies to victory. Generals are not
developed in the saddle on our plains fighting savages. Our country is
going to need a leader of supreme genius. I saw him in a vision, the
night I read in the _Richmond Enquirer_ that you had been called to West
Point. I shall not see you again. I am walking now into the sunset.
Soon the shadows will enfold me and I shall sleep the long sleep. I am
content. I have lived. I have loved. I have succeeded and failed. I have
swept the gamut of human passion and human emotion. I have no right to
more. Yet I envy you the glory of manhood in the crisis that is coming.
May the God of our fathers keep you and teach you and bless you is my
prayer."

Lee was too deeply moved for words to reply. He pressed his old friend's
hand, held it in silence and turned away.

The young people rode horseback. Never in his life had Phil seen
anything to equal the easy grace with which these Southern girls sat
their horses. Their mothers before them had been born in the saddle.
Their ease, their grace was not an acquirement of the teacher. It was
bred in the bone.

When a boy challenged a girl for a race, the challenge was instantly
accepted. Their saddles were made of the finest leather which the best
saddle makers of England and America could find. Their girths were set
with double silver buckles. A saddle never turned.

When the long procession reached the gates of Arlington, it seemed to
Phil that half the congregation were going to stop for dinner. A large
part of them did. Every friend and neighbor who pressed Colonel Lee's
hand, or the hand of his wife, had been invited.

When they reached the Hall and Library to talk, their conversation
covered a wide range of interest. The one topic tabooed was scandal.
It might be whispered behind closed doors. It was never the subject of
conversation in an assembly of friends and neighbors in the home. They
talked of the rich harvest. They discussed the changes in the fortunes
of their mutual friends. They had begun to demand better roads. They
discussed the affairs of the County, the Church, the State. The ladies
chatted of fashions, of course. But they also discussed the latest
novels of George Eliot with keen interest and true insight into their
significance in the development of English literature. They knew their
Dickens, Thackeray and Scott almost by heart--especially Scott. They
expressed their opinions of the daring work of the new author with
enthusiasm. Some approved; others had doubts. They did not yet know that
George Eliot was a woman.

The chief topic of conversation among the men was politics, State and
National. The problems of the British Empire came in for a share of the
discussion. These men not only read Burke and Hume, Dickens and Scott,
they read the newspapers of England and they kept up with the program of
English political parties as their fathers had. And they quoted their
opinions as authority for a younger generation. On the shelves of the
library could be seen the classics in sober bindings and sprinkled with
them a few French authors of distinction.

Over all brooded the spirit of a sincere hospitality, gentle, cordial,
simple, generous. They did not merely possess homes, they loved their
homes. The two largest words in the tongue which they spoke were Duty
and Honor. They were not in a hurry. The race for wealth had never
interested them. They took time to play, to rest, to worship God, to
chat with their neighbors, to enjoy a sunset. They came of a race
of world-conquering men and they felt no necessity for hurrying or
apologizing for their birthright.

It was precisely this attitude of mind which made the savage attack of
the Abolitionists so far-reaching in its possible results.



CHAPTER X


The morning of the departure dawned with an overcast sky, the prophecy
of winter in the gray clouds that hung over the surface of the river. A
chill mist, damp and penetrating, crept up the heights from the water's
edge and veiled the city from view.

Something in the raw air bruised afresh the thought of goodbye to the
Southland. The threat of cold in Virginia meant the piling of ice and
snow in the North. Not a sparrow chirped in the hedges. Only a crow,
passing high in the dull sky, called his defiance of wind and weather.

The Colonel made his final round of inspection to see that his people
were provided against the winter. Behind each servant's cottage, a huge
pile of wood was stacked. The roofs were in perfect order. The chimneys
were pouring columns of smoke. It hung low at first but rolled away at
the touch of the breeze from the North.

With Mrs. Lee he visited the aged and the sick. The thing that brought
the smile to each withered mouth was the assurance of their love and
care always.

Among the servants Sam held the center of interest. The wonderful,
doubtful, yet fascinating thing had come to him. He had been set free.
In each heart was the wish and with it fear of the future. The younger
ones laughed and frankly envied him. The older ones wagged their heads
doubtfully.

Old Ben expressed the best feelings of the wiser as he took Sam's hand
for a fatherly word. He had finished the packing in an old cowhide trunk
which Custis had given him.

"We's all gwine ter watch ye, boy, wid good wishes in our hearts and a
whole lot er misgivin's a playin' roun' in our min'."

"Don't yer worry 'bout me, Uncle Ben. I'se all right."

He paused and whispered.

"Ye didn't know dat Marse Robert done gimme five hundred dollars in
gol'--did ye?"

"Five hundred dollars in gol'!" Ben gasped.

Sam drew the shining yellow eagles from the bag in his pocket and
jingled them before the old man's eyes.

"Dar it is."

Ben touched it reverently.

"Praise God fer de good folks He give us."

"I'se er proud nigger, I is. I'se sorry fur dem dat b'longs to po'
folks."

Ben looked at him benignly.

"Don't you be too proud, boy. You'se powerful young and foolish. Yer des
barely got sense enough ter git outen a shower er rain. Dat money ain't
gwine ter las yer always."

"No, but man, des watch my smoke when I git up North. Yer hear frum me,
yer will."

"I hopes I hear de right news."

Sam replaced his coin with a touch of authority in possession.

"Don't yer worry 'bout me no mo'. I'se a free man now an' I gwine ter
come into de Kingdom."

The last important task done by the Colonel before taking the train for
New York was the delivery to his lawyers of instructions for the removal
of the Doyles and the placing in his hands sufficient funds for their
journey.

He spent a day in Washington investigating the chances of the new
settler securing a quarter section of land in Miami County, Kansas,
the survey of which had been completed. He selected this County on the
Missouri border to please Mrs. Doyle. She wished to live as near the
line of old Virginia's climate as possible and in a country with trees.

Doyle promised to lose no time in disposing of his goods. The father,
mother, three sons and two little girls were at Arlington to bid the
Colonel and his family goodbye. They were not a demonstrative people but
their affection for their neighbor and friend could not be mistaken.

The mother's eyes followed him with no attempt to hide her tears. She
wiped them away with her handkerchief. And went right on crying and
wiping them again. The boys were too shy to press forward in the crowd
and grasp the Colonel's hand.

On arrival in New York the party stopped at the new Hotel Astor on
Broadway. Colonel Lee had promised to spend a day at Fort Hamilton,
his old command. But it was inconvenient to make the trip until the
following morning.

Besides, he had important business to do for Sam. He had sent two of the
servants, whom he had emancipated, to Liberia, and he planned the same
journey for Sam. He engaged a reservation for him on a steamer sailing
for Africa, and returned to the hotel at nine o'clock ready to leave for
Fort Hamilton.

He was compelled to wait for Sam's return from the boarding house for
colored people on Water Street where he had been sent by the proprietor
of the Astor. Not even negro servants were quartered in a first-class
hotel in New York or any other Northern city.

Sam arrived at half-past nine, and the Colonel strolled down Broadway
with him to the little park at Bowling Green. He found a seat and bade
Sam sit down beside him.

The boy watched the expression on his old master's face with dread. He
had a pretty clear idea what this interview was to be about and he had
made up his mind on the answer. His uncle, who had been freed five years
before, had written him a glowing letter about Liberia.

He dreaded the subject.

"You know, of course, Sam," the Colonel began, "that your life is now in
your own hands and that I can only advise you as a friend."

"An' I sho's glad ter have ye he'p me, Marse Robert."

"I'm going to give you the best advice I can. I'm going to advise you to
do exactly what I would do if I were in your place."

"Yassah."

"If I were you, Sam, I wouldn't stay in this country. I'd go back to
the land of my black fathers, to its tropic suns and rich soil. You can
never be a full-grown man here. The North won't have you as such. The
hotel wouldn't let you sleep under its roof, in spite of my protest that
you were my body-servant. In the South the old shadow of your birth will
be with you. If you wish to lift up your head and be a man it can't be
here. No matter what comes in the future. If every black man, woman and
child were set free to-morrow, there are not enough negroes to live
alone. The white man will never make you his equal in the world he is
building. I've secured your passage to Liberia and I will pay for it
without touching the money which I gave you. What do you think of it?"

Sam scratched his head and looked away embarrassed. He spoke timidly at
first, but with growing assurance.

"I'se powerful 'fraid dat Liberia's a long way frum home, Marse Robert."

"It is. But if you wish to be a full-grown man, it's your chance to-day.
It will be the one chance of your people in the future as well. Can you
make up your mind to face the loneliness and build your home under
your own vine and fig tree? There you can look every man in the face,
conscious that you're as good as he is and that the world is yours."

"I'se feared I ain't got de spunk, Marse Robert."

"The gold in your pocket will build you a house on public lands. You
know how to farm. Africa has a great future. You've seen our life. We've
taught you to work, to laugh, to play, to worship God, to love your home
and your people. You're only twenty years old. I envy you the wealth of
youth. I've reached the hilltop of life. Your way is still upward for
a quarter of a century. It's the morning of life, boy, and a new world
calls you. Will you hear it and go?"

"I'se skeered, Marse Robert," Sam persisted, shaking his head gravely.

Lee saw the hopelessness of his task and changed his point of appeal.

"What do you think of doing?"

"Who, me?"

"Who else? I can't think for you any longer."

"Oh, I'll be all right, sah. I foun' er lot er good colored friends in
de bordin' house las' night. Wid dat five hundred dollars, I be livin'
in clover here, sah, sho. I done talk wid a feller 'bout goin' in
business."

"What line of business?"

"He gwine ter sho me ter-day, sah."

"You don't think you might change your mind about Liberia?"

"Na sah. I don't like my uncle dat's ober dar, nohow."

"Then I can't help you any more, Sam?"

"Na sah, Marse Robert. Y'u been de bes' master any nigger eber had in
dis worl' an' I ain't nebber gwine ter fergit dat. When I feels dem five
hundred dollars in my pocket I des swells up lak I gwine ter bust. I'se
dat proud o' myse'f an' my ole marster dat gimme a start. Lordee, sah,
hit's des gwine ter be fun fer me ter git long an' I mak' my fortune
right here. Ye see ef I don't--"

Lee smiled indulgently.

"Watch out you don't lose the little one I gave you."

"Yassah, I got hit all sewed up in my close."

The old master saw that further argument would be useless. He rose
wondering if his act of emancipation were not an act of cowardice--the
shirking of responsibility for the boy's life. His mouth closed firmly.
That was just the point about the institution of Slavery. No such
responsibility should be placed on any man's shoulders.

Sam insisted on ministering to the wants of the family until he saw them
safely on the boat for West Point. He waved each member a long goodbye.
And then hurried to his new chum at the boarding house on Water Street.
This dusky friend had won Sam's confidence by his genial ways on the
first night of their acquaintance. He had learned that Sam had just been
freed. That this was his first trip to New York though he spoke with
careless ease of his knowledge of Washington.

But the most important fact revealed was that he had lately come into
money through the generosity of his former master. The sable New Yorker
evinced no curiosity about the amount.

After four days of joy he waked from a sickening stupor. He found
himself lying in a filthy alley at dawn, bareheaded, his coat torn up
the back, every dollar gone and his friend nowhere to be found.

Colonel Lee had given him the address of three clergymen and told him to
call on them for help if he had any trouble. He looked everywhere for
these cards. They couldn't be found. He had been so cocksure of himself
he had lost them. He couldn't make up his mind to stoop to blacking
boots and cleaning spittoons. He had always lived with aristocrats. He
felt himself one to his finger tips.

There was but one thing he could do that seemed to be needed up here.
He could handle tobacco. He could stem the leaf. He had learned that
at Arlington in helping Ben superintend the curing of the weed for the
servants' use.

He made the rounds of the factories only to find that the larger part
of this work was done in tenement homes. He spent a day finding one of
these workshops.

They offered to take him in as a boarder and give him sixty cents a day.
He could have a pallet beside the six children in the other room and a
place to put his trunk. Sixty cents a day would pay his room rent and
give him barely enough food to keep body and soul together.

He hurried back to his boarding house, threw the little trunk on his
back and trudged to the tobacco tenement. When he arrived no one stopped
work. The mother waved her hand to the rear. He placed his trunk in a
dark corner, came out and settled to the task of stemming tobacco.

He did his work with a skill and ease that fascinated the children. He
took time to show them how to grip the leaf to best advantage and rip
the stem with a quick movement that left scarcely a trace of the weed
clinging to it. He worked with a swinging movement of his body and began
to sing in soft, low tones.

The wizened eyes brightened, and when he stopped one of them whispered:

"More, black man. Sing some more!"

He sang one more song and choked. His eye caught the look of mortal
weariness in the tired face of the little girl of six and his voice
wouldn't work.

"Goddermighty!" he muttered, "dese here babies ought not ter be wukkin
lak dis!"

When lunch time came the six children begged Sam to live in the place
and take his meals with them.

Their mother joined in the plea and offered to board him for thirty
cents a day. This would leave him a few cents to spend outside. He
couldn't yet figure on clothes. It didn't seem right to have to pay for
such things. Anyhow he had enough to last him awhile.

He decided to accept the offer and live as a boarder with the family.
The lunch was discouraging. A piece of cold bread and a glass of water
from the hydrant. Sam volunteered to bring the water.

The hydrant was the only water supply for the six hundred people whose
houses touched the alley. It stood in the center. The only drainage
was a sink in front of it. All the water used had to be carried up the
stairs and the slops carried down. The tired people did little carrying
downstairs. Pans and pails full of dishwater were emptied out the
windows with no care for the passer below. Scarcely a day passed without
a fight from this cause. A fight in the quarter was always a pleasure to
the settlement.

Sam munched his bread and sipped his water. He watched the children eat
their pieces ravenously. He couldn't finish his. He handed it to the
smallest one of the children who was staring at him with eyes that
chilled his heart. He knew the child was still hungry. Such a lunch as a
piece of bread and a tin cup of water must be an accident, of course.
He had heard of jailers putting prisoners on bread and water to punish
them. He had never known human beings living at home to have such food.
They would have a good dinner steaming hot. He was sure of that.

A sudden commotion broke out in the alley below. Yells, catcalls, oaths
and the sound of crashing bricks, coal, pieces of furniture, and the
splash of much water came from the court.

The mother rushed to the window and hurled a stone. There was a pile of
them in the corner of the room.

Sam tried to look out.

"What's de matter, ma'm? Is dey er fight?"

"No--nothin' but a rent collector." The woman smiled.

It was the first pleasant thought that had entered her mind since Sam
had come.

The dinner was as rude a surprise as the lunch. He watched the woman
fumble over lighting the fire in the stove until he could stand it no
longer.

"Lemme start de fire fer ye, ma'm," he offered at last.

"I wish you would," she sighed. "I married when I wuz seventeen and I
never had made a fire before. I don't believe I'll ever learn."

The negro was not long in observing that she knew no more about cooking
than she did about lighting a fire. The only cooking utensils in the
place were a pot and a frying pan. The frying pan was in constant use.
For dinner she fried a piece of tough beef without seasoning. She didn't
know how to make bread. She bought the soggy stuff at the grocer's.
There was no bread for dinner at all. They had boiled potatoes, boiled
in plain water without even a grain of salt or pepper. The coffee was so
black and heavy and bitter he couldn't drink it.

The father had a cup of beer with his coffee. A cup of beer was provided
for Sam. The girl of twelve had rushed the growler to the corner saloon.
The negro had never tasted beer before and he couldn't drink it. The
stuff was horrible. It reminded him of a dose of quinine his mistress
had once made him take when he had a chill.

He worked harder than usual next day to forget the fear that haunted
him. At night he was ill. He had caught cold and had a fever. He dropped
on his pallet without dinner and didn't get up for three weeks.

He owed his landlady so much money now, he felt in honor bound to board
with her and give her all his earnings. He felt himself sinking into an
abyss and he didn't have the strength to fight his way out.

The thing that hurt him more than bad food and air when he got to his
work again was the look of death in the faces of the children. Their
eyes haunted him in the dark as they slept on the same floor. He would
get out of there when he was strong again. But these children would
never go except to be hauled in the dead wagon to the Potter's Field.
And he heard the rattle of this black wagon daily.

In a mood of desperation he walked down Water Street past the boarding
house. In front of the place he met a boarder who had spoken to him
the last day of his stay. He seized Sam by the coat, led him aside and
whispered:

"Has ye heard 'bout de old man, name John Brown, dat come ter lead de
niggers ter de promise' lan'?"

"No, but I'se waitin' fur somebody ter lead me."

"Come right on wid me, man. I'se a-goin' to a meetin' to-night an' jine
de ban'. Will ye jine us?"

"I jine anything dat'll lead me to de promise' lan'."

"Come on. Hit's over in Brooklyn but a nigger's gwine ter meet me at de
ferry and take me dar."

Sam felt in his pocket for the money for the ferry. Luckily he had
twenty cents. It was worth while to gamble that much on a trip to the
promised land.

An emissary of the prophet met them on the Brooklyn side and led them to
a vacant store with closed wooden shutters. No light could be seen from
the street. The guide rapped a signal and the door opened. Inside were
about thirty negroes gathered before a platform. Chairs filled the long
space. A white man was talking to the closely packed group of blacks.
Sam pressed forward and watched him.

He was old until he began to talk. And then there was something strange
and electric in his tones that made him young. His voice was vaulting
and metallic and throbbed with an indomitable will. There was contagion
in the fierceness of his tones. It caught his hearers and called them in
a spell.

His shoulders were stooped. His manner grim and impressive. There was
a quick, wiry movement to his body that gave the idea that he was
crouching to spring. It was uncanny. It persisted as his speech
lengthened.

He was talking in cold tones of the injustice being done the black man
in the South. Of the crimes against God and humanity which the Southern
whites were daily committing.

The one feature of the strange speaker that fascinated Sam was the
glitter of his shifting eyes. He never held them still. He did not try
to bore a man through with them. They were restless, as if moved by
hidden forces within. The flash of light from their depths seemed a
signal from an unknown world.

Sam watched him with open mouth.

He was finishing his talk now in a desultory way more gripping in its
deadly calm than the most passionate appeal.

"We are enrolling volunteers," he quietly announced. "Volunteers in the
United States League of Gileadites. If you sign your names to the roll
to-night understand clearly what you are doing. I have written for each
member _Words of Advice_ which he must memorize as the guide to his
action."

He drew a sheet of paper from his pocket and read:

"No jury can be found in the Northern States, that would convict a man
for defending his rights to the last extremity. This is well understood
by Southern Congressmen, who insist that the right of trial by jury
should not be granted to the fugitive slave. Colored people have more
fast friends among the whites than they suppose. Just think of the money
expended by individuals in your behalf in the past twenty years! Think
of the number who have been mobbed and imprisoned on your account. Have
any of you seen the branded hand? Do you remember the names of Lovejoy
and Torrey? Should any of your number be arrested, you must collect
together as quickly as possible so as to outnumber your adversaries who
are taking an active part against you. Let no able-bodied man appear on
the ground unequipped or with his weapons exposed to view; let that be
understood beforehand. Your plans must be known only to yourself, and
with the understanding that all traitors must die, wherever caught and
proven to be guilty.

"'Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him return and depart early from
Mount Gilead' (Judges VII Chapter, 3rd verse; Deuteronomy XX Chapter,
8th verse). Give all cowards an opportunity to show it on condition of
holding their peace. Do not delay one moment after you're ready: you
will lose all your resolution if you do. Let the first blow be the
signal for all to engage; and when engaged do not do your work by
halves; but make clean work with your enemies--"

It was the slow way in which he spoke the last words that gave them
meaning. Sam could hear in his tones the crash of steel into human flesh
and the grating of the blade on the bone. It made him shiver.

Every negro present joined the League.

When the last man had signed, John Brown led in a long prayer to
Almighty God to bless the holy work on which these noble men had
entered. At the close of his prayer he announced that on the following
night at the People's Hall on the Bowery in New York, the Honorable
Gerrit Smith, the noblest friend of the colored men in the North, would
preside over a mass meeting in behalf of the downtrodden. He asked them
all to come and bring their friends.

The ceremony of signing over, Sam turned to the guide with a genial
smile.

"I done jine de League."

"That's right. I knew you would."

"I'se a full member now, ain't I?"

"Of course."

"When do we eat?" Sam asked eagerly.

"Eat?"

"Sho."

"We ain't organizin' de Gileadites to eat, man."

"Ain't we?"

"No, sah. We'se organizin'--ter kill white men dat come atter runaway
slaves."

"But ain't dey got nuttin ter eat fer dem dat's here?"

"You come ter de big meetin' ter-morrow night an' hear sumfin dat's good
fer yo' soul."

"I'll be dar," Sam promised. But he hoped to find something at the
meeting that was good for his stomach as well as his soul.



CHAPTER XI


The negroes in New York and Brooklyn were not the only people in the
North falling under the influence of the strange man who answered to the
name of John Brown. There was something magnetic about him that drew all
sorts and conditions of men.

The statesmen who still used reason as the guiding principle of life had
no use for him. Henry Wilson, the new Senator from Massachusetts, met
him and was repelled by the something that drew others. Governor Andrew
was puzzled by his strange personality.

The secret of his power lay in a mystic appeal to the Puritan
conscience. He had been from childhood afflicted with this conscience in
its most malignant form. He knew instinctively its process of action.

The Puritan had settled New England and fixed the principles both of
economic and political life. The civilization he set up was compact and
commercial. He organized it in towns and townships. The Meeting House
was the center, the source of all power and authority. No dwelling could
be built further than two miles from a church and attendance on worship
was made compulsory by law.

The South, against whose life Brown was organizing his militant crusade,
was agricultural, scattered, individual. Individualism was a passion
with the Southerner, liberty his battle cry. He scorned the "authority"
of the church and worshipped God according to the dictates of his own
conscience. The Court House, not the Meeting House, was his forum,
and he rode there through miles of virgin forests to dispute with his
neighbor.

The mental processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly
different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to
hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance
became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass of
Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner
perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a
poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not
only resist and attack the world; he should _hate_ it. He early learned
to love the pleasure of hating. He hated himself if no more promising
victim loomed on the horizon. He early became the foremost Persecutor
and Vice-Crusader of the new world. He made witch-hunting one of the
sports of New England.

When not busy with some form of the witch hunt, the Puritan found an
outlet for his repressed instincts in the ferocity with which he fought
the Indians or worked to achieve the conquest of Nature and lay up
worldly goods for himself and his children. Prosperity, therefore,
became the second principle of his religion, next to vice crusading.
When he succeeded in business, he praised God for his tender mercies.
His goods and chattels became the visible evidence of His love. The only
holiday he established or permitted was the day on which he publicly
thanked God for the goods which He had delivered. Through him the New
England Puritan Thanksgiving Day became a national festival and through
him a religious reverence for worldly success has become a national
ideal.

The inner life of the Puritan was soul-fear. Driven by fear and
repression he attacked his rock-ribbed country, its thin soil, its
savage enemies and his own fellow competitors with fury.

And he succeeded.

The odds against him sharpened his powers, made keen his mind, toughened
his muscles.

The Southern planter, on the other hand, represented the sharpest
contrast to this mental and physical attitude toward life. He came of
the stock of the English Squire. And if he came from Scotland he found
this English ideal already established and accepted it as his own.

The joy of living, not the horror of life, was the mainspring of his
action and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. The
Southerner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full of
spiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did not
agonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove it
from his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyal
to his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised trade. He
disliked hard work.

To this hour in the country's life his ideal had dominated the nation.

The Puritan Abolitionists now challenged this ideal for a fight to the
finish. Slavery was protected by the Constitution. All right, they burn
the Constitution and denounce it as a Covenant with Death, an agreement
with Hell. They begin a propaganda to incite servile insurrection in
the South. They denounce the Southern Slave owner as a fiend. Even
the greatest writers of the North caught the contagion of this mania.
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson used their pens to blacken the
name of the Southern people. From platform, pulpit and forum, through
pamphlet, magazine, weekly and daily newspapers the stream of abuse
poured forth in ever-increasing volume.

That the proud Southerner would resent the injustice of this wholesale
indictment was inevitable. Their habit of mind, their born instinct of
leadership, their love of independence, their hatred of dictation, their
sense of historic achievement in the building of the republic would
resent it. Their critics had not only been Slave holders themselves as
long as it paid commercially, but their skippers were now sailing the
seas in violation of Southern laws prohibiting the slave trade. Our
early Slave traders were nearly all Puritans. When one of their ships
came into port, the minister met her at the wharf, knelt in prayer and
thanked Almighty God for one more cargo of heathen saved from hell.

Brown's whole plan of attack was based on the certainty of resentment
from the South. He set out to provoke his opponents. This purpose was
now the inspiration of every act of his life.

A group of six typical Northern minds had fallen completely under his
power: Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Rev. Theodore Parker, Rev. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, George L. Stearns and the Rev. Hon. Gerrit
Smith.

Gerrit Smith was many times a millionaire, one of the great land owners
of the country, a former partner in business with John Jacob Astor, the
elder, and at this time a philanthropist by profession. He had built a
church at Peterboro, New York, and had preached a number of years. In
his growing zeal as an Abolitionist he had entered politics and had just
been elected to Congress from his district.

He was a man of gentle, humane impulses and looked out upon the world
with the kindliest fatherly eyes. It was one of the curious freaks of
fate that he should fall under the influence of Brown. The stern old
Puritan was his antithesis in every line of face and mental make-up.

Smith was the preacher, the theorist, and the dreamer.

Brown had become the man of Action.

And by Action he meant exactly what the modern Social anarchist means
by _direct action_. The plan he had developed was to come to "close
quarters" with Slavery. He had organized the Band of Gileadites to kill
every officer of the law who attempted to enforce the provisions of the
Constitution of the United States relating to Slavery. His eyes were now
fixed on the Territory of Kansas.

There could be no doubt about the abnormality of the mind of the man who
had constituted himself the Chosen Instrument of Almighty God to destroy
chattel Slavery in the South.

He was pacing the floor of the parlor of the New Astor House awaiting
the arrival of his friend, Congressman Gerrit Smith, for a conference
before the meeting scheduled for eight o'clock. It was a characteristic
of Brown that he couldn't sit still. He paced the floor.

The way he walked marked him with distinction, if not eccentricity. He
walked always with a quick, springing step. He didn't swing his foot. It
worked on springs. And the spring in it had a furtive action not unlike
the movement of a leopard. His muscles, in spite of his fifty-four
years, were strong and sinewy. He was five feet ten inches in height.

His head was remarkable for its small size. The brain space was limited
and the hair grew low on his forehead, as if a hark back to the
primitive man out of which humanity grew. His chin protruded into an
aggressive threat. His mouth was not only stern, it was as inexorable as
an oath.

His hair was turning gray and he wore it trimmed close to his small
skull. His nose was an aggressive Roman type. The expression of his face
was shrewd and serious, with a touch always of cunning.

A visitor at his house at North Elba whispered one day to one of his
sons:

"Your father looks like an eagle."

The boy hesitated and replied in deep seriousness:

"Yes, or some other carnivorous bird."

The thing above all others that gave him the look of a bird of prey was
his bluish-gray eye. An eye that was never still and always shone with a
glitter. The only time this strange light was not noticeable was during
the moments when he drew the lids down half-way. He was in the habit of
holding his eyes half shut in times of deep thinking. At these moments
if he raised his head, his eyes glowed two pin points of light.

No matter what the impression he made, either of attraction or
repulsion, his personality was a serious proposition. No man looked once
only. And no man ever attempted undue familiarity or ridicule. His life
to this time had been a series of tragic failures in everything he had
undertaken. A study of his intense Puritan face revealed at once his
fundamental character. A soul at war with the world. A soul at war with
himself. He was the incarnation of repressed emotions and desires. He
had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of
twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given
birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of
her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs of unbalanced
mentality.

The grip of his mind on the individuals who allowed themselves to be
drawn within the circle of his influence became absolute.

He was a man of earnest and constant prayer to his God. The God he
worshipped was one whose face was not yet revealed to the crowd that
hung on his strangely halting words. He spoke in mystic symbols. His
mysticism was always the source of his power over the religious leaders
who had gathered about him. They had not stopped to analyze the meaning
of this appeal. They looked once into his shining blue-gray eyes and
became his followers. He never stopped to reason.

He spoke with authority.

He claimed a divine commission for action and they did not pause to
examine his credentials. He had failed at every enterprise he had
undertaken. And then he suddenly discovered his power over the Puritan
imagination.

To Brown's mind, from the day of his devotion to the fixed idea
of destroying Slavery in the South, "Action" had but one
meaning--bloodshed. He knew that revolutionary ideas are matters of
belief. He asserted beliefs. The elect believed. The damned refused to
believe.

Long before Smith had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by
the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his
absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to
his feet and put himself in an attitude of defense.

He gazed at his friend a moment and rubbed his eyes in a dazed way
before he could come back to earth.

In a moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked
into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not
yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to
its tremendous import--primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through
hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who was his jungle father.

Smith did not know that he was to preside at the meeting until Brown
told him. He consented without a moment's hesitation.



CHAPTER XII


On their way to the hall on the Bowery Gerrit Smith and John Brown
passed through dimly lighted streets along which were drifting scores of
boys and girls, ragged, friendless, homeless, shelterless in the chill
night. The strange old man's eyes were fixed on space. He saw nothing,
heard nothing of the city's roaring life or the call of its fathomless
misery.

He saw nothing even when they passed a house with a red light before
which little girls of twelve were selling flowers. Neither of the men,
living for a single fixed idea, caught the accent of evil in the child's
voice as she stepped squarely in front of them and said:

"What's ye hurry?"

When they turned aside she piped again:

"Won't ye come in?"

They merely passed on. The infinite pathos of the scene had made no
impression. That this child's presence on the streets was enough to
damn the whole system of society to the lowest hell never dawned on the
philanthropist or the man of Action.

The crowd in the hall was not large. The place was about half full and
it seated barely five hundred. The masses of the North as yet took no
stock in the Abolition Crusade.

They felt the terrific pressure of the problem of life at home too
keenly to go into hysterics over the evils of Negro Slavery in the
South. William Lloyd Garrison had been preaching his denunciations for
twenty-one years and its fruits were small. The masses of the people
were indifferent.

But a man was pushing his way to the platform of the little hall
to-night who was destined to do a deed that would accomplish what all
the books and all the magazines and all the newspapers of the Crusaders
had tried in vain to do.

Small as the crowd was, there was something sinister in its composition.
Half of them were foreigners. It was the first wave of the flood of
degradation for our racial stock in the North--the racial stock of John
Adams and John Hancock.

A few workingmen were scattered among them. Fifty or sixty negroes
occupied the front rows. Sam had secured a seat on the aisle. Gerrit
Smith rose without ceremony and introduced Brown. There were no women
present. He used the formal address to the American voter:

"Fellow Citizens:

"I have the honor to present to you to-night a man chosen of God to lead
our people out of the darkness of sin, my fellow worker in the Kingdom,
the friend of the downtrodden and the oppressed, John Brown."

Faint applause greeted the old man as he moved briskly to the little
table with his quick, springing step.

He fixed the people with his brilliant eyes and they were silent. He was
slow of speech, awkward in gesture, and without skill in the building of
ideas to hold the imagination of the typical crowd.

It was not a typical crowd of American freemen. It was something new
under the sun in our history. It was the beginning of the coming mob
mind destined to use Direct Action in defiance of the Laws on which the
Republic had been built.

There was no mistaking the message Brown bore. He proclaimed that the
negro is the blood brother of the white man. The color of his skin was
an accident. This white man with a black skin was now being beaten and
ground into the dust by the infamy of his masters. Their crimes cried
to God for vengeance. All the negro needed was freedom to transform him
into a white man--your equal and mine. At present, our brothers and
sisters are groaning in chains on Southern plantations. His vaulting
metallic tones throbbed with a strange, cold passion as he called for
Action.

The vibrant call for bloodshed in this cry melted the crowd into a new
personality. The mildest spirit among them was merged into the mob
mind of the speaker. And every man within the sound of his voice was a
murderer.

The final leap of the speaker's soul into an expression of supreme hate
for the Southern white man found its instant echo in the mob which
he had created. They demanded no facts. They asked no reasons. They
accepted his statements as the oracle of God. They were opinions,
beliefs, dogmas, the cries of propaganda only--precisely the food needed
for developing the mob mind to its full strength. Envy, jealousy, hatred
ruled supreme. Liberty was a catchword. Blood lust was the motive power
driving each heart beat.

Brown suddenly stopped. His speech had reached no climax. It had rambled
into repetition. Its power consisted in the repetition of a fixed
thought. He knew the power of this repeated hammering on the mind. An
idea can be repeated until it is believed, true or false. He had pounded
his message into his hearers until they were incapable of resistance. It
was unnecessary for him to continue. He stopped so suddenly, they waited
in silence for him to go on after he had taken his seat.

A faint applause again swept the front of the house. There was something
uncanny about the man that hushed applause. They knew that he was
indifferent to it. Hidden fires burned within him that lighted the way
of life. He needed no torches held on high. He asked no honors.
He expected no applause and he got little. What he did demand was
submission to his will and obedience as followers.

Gerrit Smith rose with this thought gripping his gentle spirit. His
words came automatically as if driven by another's mind.

"Our friend and leader has dedicated his life to the service of
suffering humanity. It is our duty to follow. The first step is to
sacrifice our money in his cause."

The ushers passed the baskets and Sam's heart warmed as he heard the
coin rattle. His eyes bulged when he saw that one of them had a pile of
bills in it that covered the coin. He heard the great and good man say
that it was for the poor brother in black. He saw visions of a warm
room, of clean food and plenty of it.

He was glad he'd come, although he didn't like the look in John Brown's
eyes while he spoke. Their fierce light seemed to bore through him and
hurt. Now that he was seated and his eyes half closed, uplifted toward
the ceiling, he wasn't so formidable. He rather liked him sitting down.

The ushers poured the money on the table and counted it. Sam had not
seen so much money together since he piled his five hundred dollars in
gold in a stack and looked at it. He watched the count with fascination.
There must be a thousand at least.

He was shocked when the head usher leaned over the edge of the platform,
and whispered to Smith the total.

"Eighty-five dollars."

Sam glanced sadly at the two rows of negroes in front. There wouldn't
be much for each. He took courage in the thought, however, that some of
them were well-to-do and wouldn't ask their share. He was sure of this
because he had seen three or four put something in the baskets.

Gerrit Smith announced the amount of the collection with some
embarrassment and heartily added:

"My check for a hundred and fifteen dollars makes the sum an even two
hundred."

That was something worth while. Smith and Brown held a conference about
the announcement of another meeting as Sam whispered to the head usher:

"Could ye des gimme mine now an' lemme go?"

"Yours?"

"Yassah."

"Your share of the collection?"

The usher eyed him in scorn.

"To be sho," Sam answered confidently. "Yer tuk it up fer de po' black
man. I'se black, an' God knows I'se po'."

"You're a poor fool!"

"What ye take hit up fer den?"

"To support John Brown, not to feed lazy, good-for-nothing, free
negroes."

Sam turned from the man in disgust. He was about to rise and shamble
back to his miserable pallet when a sudden craning of necks and moving
of feet drew his eye toward the door.

He saw a man stalking down the aisle. He carried on his left arm a
little bundle of filthy rags. He mounted the platform and spoke to the
Chairman:

"Mr. Smith, may I say just a word to this meeting?"

The Philanthropist Congressman recognized him instantly as the most
eloquent orator in the labor movement in America. He had met him at a
Reform Convention. He rose at once.

"Certainly."

"Fellow Citizens, Mr. George Evans, the leading advocate of Organized
Labor in America, wishes to speak to you. Will you hear him?"

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" came from all parts of the house.

The man began in quivering tones that held Sam and gripped the unwilling
mind of the crowd:

"My friends: Just a few words. I have in my arms the still breathing
skeleton of a little girl. I found her in a street behind this building
within the sound of the voice of your speaker."

He paused and waved to John Brown.

"She was fighting with a stray cat for a crust of bread in a garbage
pail. I hold her on high."

With both hands he lifted the dazed thing above his head.

"Look at her. This bundle of rags God made in the form of a woman to be
the mother of the race. She has been thrown into your streets to starve.
Her father is a workingman whom I know. For six months, out of work,
he fought with death and hell, and hell won. He is now in prison. Her
mother, unable to support herself and child, sought oblivion in drink.
She's in the gutter to-night. Her brother has joined a gang on the East
Side. Her sister is a girl of the streets.

"You talk to me of Negro Slavery in the South? Behold the child of the
White Wage Slave of the North! Why are you crying over the poor negro?
In the South the master owns the slave. Here the master owns the job.
Down there the master feeds, clothes and houses his man with care. Black
children laugh and play. Here the master who owns the job buys labor in
the open market. He can get it from a man for 75 cents a day. From a
woman for 30 cents a day. When he has bought the last ounce of strength
they can give, the master of the wage slave kicks him out to freeze or
starve or sink into crime.

"You tell me of the white master's lust down South? I tell you of the
white master's lust for the daughters of our own race.

"I see a foreman of a factory sitting in this crowd. I've known him for
ten years. I've talked with a score of his victims. He has the power
to employ or discharge girls of all ages ranging from twelve to
twenty-five. Do you think a girl can pass his bead eyes and not pay for
the job the price he sees fit to demand?

"If you think so, you don't know the man. I do!"

He paused and the stillness of death followed. Necks were craned to find
the figure of the foreman crouching in the crowd. The speaker was not
after the individual. His soul was aflame with the cause of millions.

"I see also a man in the crowd who owns a row of tenements so filthy,
so dark, so reeking with disease that no Southern master would allow a
beast to live in them. This hypocrite has given to John Brown to-night
a contribution of money for the downtrodden black man. He coined this
money out of the blood of white men and women who pay the rent for the
dirty holes in which they die."

A moment of silence that was pain as he paused and a hundred eyes swept
the room in search of the man. Again the speaker stood without a sign.
He merely paused to let his message sink in the hearts of his hearers.

"My eyes have found another man in this crowd who is an employer of wage
slaves. He is here to denounce Chattel Slavery in the South as the sum
of all villainies while he practices a system of wage slavery more cruel
without a thought morally wrong.

"I say this in justice to the man because I know him. He hasn't
intelligence enough to realize what he is doing. If he had he would
begin by abolishing slavery in his own household. This reformer isn't
a bad man at heart. He is simply an honest fool. These same fools in
England have given millions to abolish black slavery in the Colonies
and leave their own slaves in the Spittalfield slums to breed a race of
paupers and criminals. Why don't a Buxton or a Wilberforce complain
of the White Slavery at home? Because it is indispensable to their
civilization. They lose nothing in freeing negroes in distant Colonies.
They would lose their fortunes if they dared free their own white
brethren.

"The master of the wage slave employs his victim only when he needs him.
The Southern master supports his man whether he needs him or not. And
cares for him when ill. The Abolitionist proposes to free the black
slave from the whip. Noble work. But to what end if he deprives him of
food? He escapes the lash and lands in a felon's cell or climbs the
steps of a gallows.

"Your inspired leader, the speaker of this evening, has found his most
enthusiastic support in New England.

"No doubt.

"In Lowell, Massachusetts, able-bodied men in the cotton mills are
receiving 80 cents a day for ten hours' work. Women are receiving 32
cents a day for the same. At no period of the history of this republic
has it been possible for a human being to live in a city and reproduce
his kind on such wages. What is the result? The racial stock that made
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a civilized state is perishing. It is
being replaced from the slums of Europe. The standard of life is dragged
lower with each generation.

"The negro, you tell me, must work for others or be flogged. The poor
white man at your door must work for others or be starved. The negro is
subject to a single master. He learns to know him, if not to like him.
There is something human in the touch of their lives. The poor white man
here is the slave of many masters. The negro may lead the life of a farm
horse. Your wage slave is a horse that hasn't even a stable. He roams
the street in the snows of winter. He is ridden by anybody who wishes a
ride. He is cared for by nobody. Our rich will do anything for the poor
except to get off their backs. The negro has a master in sickness and
health. The wage slave is honored with the privilege of slavery only so
long as he can work ten hours a day. He is a pauper when he can toil no
more.

"Your Abolitionist has fixed his eye on Chattel Slavery in the South. It
involves but three million five-hundred thousand negroes. The system of
wage slavery involves the lives of twenty-five million white men and
women.

"Slavery was not abolished in the North on moral grounds, but because,
as a system of labor it was old-fashioned, sentimental, extravagant,
inefficient. It was abolished by the masters of men, not by the men.

"The North abolished slavery for economy in production. There was no
sentiment in it. Wage slavery has proven itself ten times more cruel,
more merciless, more efficient. The Captain of Industry has seen the
vision of an empire of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He has seen
that the master who cares for the aged, the infirm, the sick, the lame,
the halt is a fool who must lag behind in the march of the Juggernaut.
Only a fool stops to build a shelter for his slave when he can kick him
out in the cold and find hundreds of fresh men to take his place.

"Two years ago the Chief of Police of the City of New York took the
census of the poor who were compelled to live in cellars. He found that
eighteen thousand five hundred and eighty-six white wage slaves lived in
these pest holes under the earth. One-thirteenth of the population of
the city lives thus underground to-day. Hundreds of these cellars are
near the river. They are not waterproof. Their floors are mud. When
the tides rise the water floods these noisome holes. The bedding and
furniture float. Fierce wharf rats, rising from their dens, dispute with
men, women and children the right to the shelves above the water line.

"There are cellars devoted entirely to lodging where working men and
women can find a bed of straw for two cents a night--the bare dirt for
one cent. Black and white men, women and children, are mixed in one
dirty mass. These rooms are without light, without air, filled with the
damp vapors of mildewed wood and clothing. They swarm with every species
of vermin that infest the animal and human body. The scenes of depravity
that nightly occur in these lairs of beasts are beyond words.

"These are the homes provided by the master who has established 'Free'
Labor as the economic weapon with which he has set out to conquer the
world.

"And he is conquering with it. The superior, merciless power of this
system as an economic weapon is bound to do in America what it has done
throughout the world. The days of Chattel Slavery are numbered. The
Abolitionist is wasting his breath, or worse. He is raising a feud that
may drench this nation in blood in a senseless war over an issue that is
settled before it's raised.

"Long ago the economist discovered that there was no vice under the
system of Chattel Slavery that could not be more freely gratified under
the new system of wage slavery.

"You weep because the negro slave must serve one master. He has no power
to choose a new one. Do not forget that the power to _choose_ a new
master carries with it power to discharge the wage slave and hire a new
one. This power to discharge is the most merciless and cruel tyranny
ever developed in the struggle of man from savagery to civilization.
This awful right places in the hand of the master the power of life and
death. He can deprive his wage slave of fuel, food, clothes, shelter.
Life is the only right worth having if its exercise is put into
question. A starving man has no liberty. The word can have no meaning.
He must live first or he cannot be a man.

"The wage slave is producing more than the chattel slaves ever produced,
man for man, and is receiving less than the negro slave of the South is
getting for his labor to-day.

"Your system of wage slavery is the cunning trick by which the cruel
master finds that he can deny to the worker all rights he ever had as a
slave.

"If you doubt its power, look at this bundle of rags in my hands and
remember that there are five thousand half-starved children homeless and
abandoned in the streets of this city to-night.

"Find for me one ragged, freezing, starving, black baby in the South and
I will buy a musket to equip an army for its invasion--"

He paused a moment, turned and gazed at the men on the platform and then
faced the crowd in a final burst of triumphant scorn.

"Fools, liars, hypocrites, clean your own filthy house before you weep
over the woes of negroes who are singing while they toil--"

A man on an end seat of the middle aisle suddenly sprang to his feet and
yelled:

"Put him out!"

Before Gerrit Smith could reach Evans with a gift of five dollars for
the sick child which he still held in his arms the crowd had become a
mob.

They hustled the labor leader into the street and told him to go back to
hell where he came from.

Through it all John Brown sat on the platform with his blue-gray eyes
fixed in space. He had seen, heard or realized nothing that had passed.
His mind was brooding over the plains of Kansas.



CHAPTER XIII


It was October, 1854, before John Brown's three sons, Owen, Frederick
and Salmon, left Ohio for their long journey to Kansas. In April, 1855,
they crossed the Missouri river and entered the Territory.

John Brown decided to move his family once more to North Elba before
going West. It was June before his people reached this negro settlement
in Northern New York. He placed his wife and children in an unplastered,
four-roomed house. Through its rough weatherboarding the winds and snows
of winter would howl. It had been hurriedly thrown together by his
son-in-law, Henry Thompson. Brown had never stayed on one of his little
farms long enough to bring order out of chaos.

His restless spirit left him no peace. He was now in Boston, now in
Springfield, Massachusetts, now in New York, again in Ohio, or Illinois.

He was giving up the work in Ohio to follow his sons into Kansas. He had
planned to move there two years before and abandoned the idea. He had at
last fully determined to go.

On October the sixth, his party reached the family settlement at
Osawatomie. With characteristic queerness the old man did not enter with
his sons, Oliver, Jason and John, Jr., and their caravan. He stopped
alone on the roadside two miles away until next day.

The party on arrival had plenty of guns, swords and ammunition but their
treasury held but sixty cents.

The family settlement were living in tents around which the chill
autumn winds were howling. The poor crops they had raised had not been
harvested. The men were ill and discouraged. There was little meat,
except game and that was difficult to kill. Their only bread was made
from corn meal ground at a hand-turned mill two miles away.

Brown's sons, who had preceded him, had lost all vigor. The old man was
not slow to see the way out.

The situation called for Action. He determined to get it. He immediately
plunged into Free Soil Politics without pausing to build his first
shanty against the coming rains and snows of a terrible winter.



CHAPTER XIV


The race for the lands of the new Territories of Kansas and Nebraska was
on to the finish. Nebraska was far North. Kansas only interested the
Southerner. The frontiersmen were crossing the boundary lines years
before Congress formally opened them for settlement.

After a brief stop in West Tennessee the Doyles had succeeded in
reaching Miami County, just beyond the Missouri border, in 1853. They
had settled on a fertile quarter section on the Pottawattomie Creek in a
small group of people of Southern feeling.

The sun of a new world had begun to shine at last for the humble but
ambitious woman who had borne five strong children to be the athletic
sons and daughters of a free country. Her soul rose in a triumphant song
that made her little home the holy of holies of a new religion. Her
husband was the lord of a domain of fertile land. His fields were green
with wheat. She loved to look over its acres of velvet carpet. In June
her man and three stalwart boys, now twenty, eighteen and fourteen years
of age, would swing the reaper into that field and harvest the waving
gold without the aid of a hired laborer. She and her little girls would
help and sing while they toiled.

There was no debt on their books. They had horses, cows, sheep, pigs,
chickens, ducks, turkeys. Their crib was bulging with corn. The bins in
their barn were filled with grain.

Their house was still the humble cottage of the prairie pioneer, but her
men had made it snug and warm against the winds and snows of winter.
Their farm had plenty of timber on the Pottawattomie Creek which flowed
through the center of the tract. They had wood for their fires and logs
with which to construct their stable and outhouses.

The house they built four-square with sharp gables patterned after the
home they had lost. There were no dormers in the attic, but two windows
peeped out of the gable beside the stone chimney and gave light and air
to the boys' room in the loft. A shed extension in the rear was large
enough for both kitchen and dining room.

The home stood close beside the creek, and the murmur of its waters made
music for a busy mother's heart.

There was no porch over the front door. But her boys had built a lattice
work that held a labyrinth of morning glories in the summer. She had
found the gorgeous wild flowers blooming on the prairies and made a
hedge of them for the walks. They were sending their shoots up through
the soil now to meet the sun of spring. The warm rays had already begun
to clothe the prairie world with beauty and fragrance.

The mother never tired of taking her girls on the hill beyond the creek
and watching the men at work on the wide sweeping plains that melted
into the skyline miles beyond. Something in its vast silence, in its
message of the infinite, soothed her spirit. All her life in the East
she had been fighting against losing odds. These wide breathing plains
had stricken the shackles from her soul.

She was free.

Sometimes she felt like shouting it into the sky. Sometimes she knelt
among the trees and thanked God for His mercy in giving her the new
lease of life.

The new lease on life had depth and meaning because she lived and
breathed in her children. Her man had a man's chance at last. Her boys
had a chance.

The one thing that gave her joy day and night was the consciousness of
living among the men and women of her own race. There was not a negro
in the county, bond or free, and she fervently prayed that there never
would be. Now that they were free from the sickening dread of such
competition in life, she had no hatred of the race. As a free white
woman, the mother of free white men and women, all she asked was freedom
from the touch of an inferior. She had always felt instinctively that
this physical contact was poison. She breathed deeply for the first
time.

There was just one cloud on the horizon which threatened her peace and
future. Her husband, after the fashion of his kind, in the old world and
the new, had always held political opinions and had dared to express
them without fear or favor. In Virginia his vote was sought by the
leaders of the county. He had been poor but he had influence because he
dared to think for himself.

He was a Southern born white man, and he held the convictions of his
birthright. He had never stopped to analyze these faiths. He believed in
them as he believed in God. They were things not to be questioned.

Doyle had not hesitated to express his opinions in Kansas as in
Virginia. The few Southern settlers on the Pottawattomie Creek were
sympathetic and no trouble had come. But the keen ears of the woman had
caught ominous rumors on the plains.

The father and mother sat on a rude board settee which John had built.
The boy had nailed it against a black jack close beside the bend of
the creek where the ripple of the hurrying waters makes music when the
stream is low and swells into a roar when gorged by the rains.

The woman's face was troubled as she listened to the waters. She studied
the strong lines of her husband's neck, shoulders and head, with a touch
of pride and fear. His tongue was long in a political argument. He had a
fatal gift of speech. He could say witty, bitter things if stung by an
opponent.

She spoke with deep seriousness:

"I wish you wouldn't talk so much, John--"

"And why not?"

"You'll get in trouble."

"Well, I've been in trouble most of my life. There's no use livin' at
all, if you live in fear. I ain't never knowed what it is to be afraid.
And I'm too old to learn."

"They say, the Northern men that's passin' into the Territory have got
guns and swords. And they say they're goin' to use 'em. They outnumber
the Southerners five to one."

"What are they goin' to do with their guns and swords? Cut a man's
tongue out because he dares to say who he's goin' to vote for next
election?"

"You don't have to talk so loud anyhow," his wife persisted.

"Ole woman, I'm free, white, and twenty-one. I've been a-votin' and
watchin' the elections in this country for twenty odd years. Ef I've got
to tiptoe around, ashamed of my raisin', and ashamed of my principles, I
don't want to live. I wouldn't be fit ter live."

"I want ye to live."

"You wouldn't want to live with a coward."

"A brave man can hold his tongue, John."

"I ain't never learnt the habit, Honey."

"Won't you begin?"

"Ye can't learn a old dog new tricks--can they, Jack?"

He stroked his dog's friendly nose suddenly thrust against his knee.

"You know, Honey," he went on laughingly, "we brought this yellow pup
from Old Virginia. He's the best rabbit and squirrel dog in the county.
I've taught him to stalk prairie chickens out here. I'd be ashamed to
look my dog in the face ef I wuz ter tuck my tail between my legs and
run every time a fool blows off his mouth about the South--"

He stopped and laughed, his white teeth gleaming through his fine beard.

"Don't you worry, Honey. Those fields are too purty this spring for
worrying. We're goin' to send Colonel Lee our last payment this fall and
we'll not owe a cent to any man on earth."



CHAPTER XV


John Brown plunged into politics in Kansas under the impression that his
will could dominate the rank and file of the Northern party. He quickly
faced the fact that the frontiersmen had opinions of their own. And they
were not in the habit of taking orders from a master.

His hopes were raised to their highest at the Free State Convention
which met at Lawrence on Monday, the twenty-fifth of June, 1855. This
Convention spoke in tones that stirred Brown's admiration.

It meant Action.

They elected him a vice president of the body. He had expected to be
made president. However, his leadership was recognized. All he needed
was the opportunity to take the Action on which his mind had long been
fixed. The moment blood began to flow, there would be but one leader. Of
that, he felt sure. He could bide his time.

The Convention urged the people to unite on the one issue of making
Kansas a Free Soil State. They called on every member of the Shawnee
Legislature who held Free Soil views to resign from that body, although
it had been recognized by the National Government as the duly authorized
law-making assembly of the Territory. They denounced this Legislature as
the creature of settlers from Missouri who had crowded over the border
before the Northerners could reach their destination. They urged all
people to refuse to obey every law passed by the body.

The final resolution was one inspired by Brown himself. It was a bold
declaration that if their opponents wished to fight, the Northerners
were READY! The challenge was unmistakable. Brown felt that Action was
imminent. Only a set of poltroons would fail to accept the gauge of
battle thus flung in their faces.

To his amazement the challenge was not received by the rank and file of
the Free Soil Party with enthusiasm. Most of these Northerners had moved
to Kansas as bona fide settlers. They came to build homes for the women
they had left behind. They came to rush their shacks into shape to
receive their loved ones. They had been furnished arms and ammunition by
enthusiastic friends and politicians in the older States. And they had
eagerly accepted the gifts. There were droves of Indians still roaming
the plains. There were dangers to be faced.

The Southern ruffians of whom they had heard so much had not
materialized. Although the Radical wing of the Northern Party had made
Lawrence its Capital and through their paper, the _Herald of Freedom_,
issued challenge after challenge to their enemies.

The Northern settlers began to divide into groups whose purposes were
irreconcilable. Six different conventions met in Lawrence on or before
the fifteenth of August. Each one of these conventions was divided in
councils. In each the cleavage between the Moderates and Radicals became
wider.

Out of the six conventions of Northerners at Lawrence, out of resolution
and counter resolution, finally emerged the accepted plan of a general
convention at Big Springs.

The gathering was remarkable for the surprise it gave to the Radicals of
whom Brown was the leader. The Convention adopted the first platform of
the Free State party and nominated ex-Governor Reeder as its candidate
for delegate to Congress.

For the first time the hard-headed frontiersmen who came to Kansas for
honest purposes spoke in plain language. The first resolution settled
the Slavery issue. It declared that Slavery was a curse and that Kansas
should be free of this curse. But that as a matter of common sense they
would consent to any reasonable adjustment in regard to the few slaves
that had already been brought into the Territory.

Brown and his followers demanded that Slavery should be denounced as a
crime, not a curse, as the sum of all villainies and the Southern master
as a vicious and willful criminal. The mild expression of the platform
on this issue wrought the old man's anger to white heat. The offer to
compromise with the slave holder already in Kansas he repudiated with
scorn. But a more bitter draught was still in store for him.

The platform provided that Kansas should be a Free White State. And in
no uncertain words made plain that the accent should be on the word
WHITE. The document demanded the most stringent laws excluding ALL
NEGROES, BOND AND FREE, forever from the Territory.

The old man did not hear this resolution when read. So deep was his
brooding anger, the words made no impression. Their full import did not
dawn on him until John Brown, Jr., leaned close and whispered:

"Did you hear that?"

The father stirred from his reverie and turned a dazed look on his son.

"Hear what?"

"The infamous resolution demanding that Kansas be made a white man's
country and no negro, bond or free, shall ever be allowed to enter it?"

The hard mouth twitched with scorn. And his jaws came together with a
snap.

"It doesn't matter what they add to their first maudlin plank on the
Slavery issue."

"Will you sit here and see this vile thing done?"

A look of weariness came over the stern face with its deep-cut lines.

"It's a waste of words to talk to politicians."

John, Jr. was grasping at the next resolution which was one surpassing
belief. He rubbed his ears to see if he were really hearing correctly.

This resolution denounced the charge that they were Radicals at all. It
denounced the attempt of any man to interfere by violence with slaves or
Slavery where protected by the supreme law of the land. It repudiated
as stale and ridiculous the charge of Abolitionism against them. And
declared that such an accusation is without a shadow of truth to support
it.

Charles Stearns, the representative of the New England Society, leaped
to his feet and denounced the platform in withering tones. He fairly
shrieked his final sentence:

"All honest anti-slavery men, here and elsewhere, will spit on your
platform!"

He paused and faced the leaders who had drafted it.

"And all pro-slavery men must forever despise the base sycophants who
originated it!"

John Brown, Jr., applauded. The crowd laughed.

Old John Brown had paid no further heed to the proceedings of the
Convention. His eyelids were drawn half down. Only pin points of
glittering light remained.

The resolutions were adopted by an overwhelming majority.

In the East, Horace Greeley in the _Tribune_ reluctantly accepted
the platform: "Why free blacks should be excluded it is difficult to
understand; but if Slavery can be kept out by compromise of that sort,
we shall not complain. An error of this character may be corrected; but
let Slavery obtain a foothold there and it is not so easily removed."

Brown's hopes were to be still further dashed by the persistence
with which the leaders of this Convention followed up the program of
establishing a white man's country on the free plains of the West.

When the Convention met at Topeka on the twenty-third of October, to
form a Constitution, the determination to exclude all negroes from
Kansas was again sustained. The majority were finally badgered into
submitting the issue to a separate vote of the people. On the fifteenth
of December, the Northern settlers voted on it and the question _was_
settled.

Negroes were excluded by a three-fourths majority.

Three-fourths of the Free State settlers were in favor of a white man's
country and the heaviest vote against the admission of negroes was
polled in Lawrence and Topeka, where the Radicals had from the first
made the most noise.

The Northern men who had come to Kansas merely to oppose the extension
of Slavery were in a hopeless minority in their own party. The American
voters still had too much common sense to be led into a position to
provoke civil war.

John Brown spent long hours in prayer after the final vote on the negro
issue had been counted. He denounced the leaders in politics in Kansas
as trimmers, time servers, sycophants and liars. He walked beneath
the star-sown skies through the night. He wrestled with his God for a
vision.

There must be a way to Action.

He rose from prayer at dawn after a sleepless night and called for his
sons, Owen, Oliver, Frederick and Salmon, to get ready for a journey. He
had received a first hint of the will of God. He believed it might lead
to the way.

He organized a surveyor's party and disguised himself as a United States
Surveyor. He had brought to Kansas a complete outfit for surveying land.
He instructed Owen and Frederick to act as chain carriers, Salmon as
axeman and Oliver as marker. He reached the little Southern settlement
on the Pottawattomie Creek the fifteenth of May.

He planted his compass on the bank of the creek near the Doyles' house
and proceeded to run a base line.

The father and three boys were in the fields at work beyond the hill.

He raised his compass and followed the chainman to the Doyles' door. The
mother and little girl trudged behind, delighted with the diversion of
the party, so rare on the lonely prairies. Little could they dream the
grim deed that was shaping in the soul of the Surveyor.

When they reached the house she turned to the old man with Southern
courtesy:

"Won't you come in, sir, and rest a few minutes?"

The strange, blue-gray eyes glanced restlessly toward the hill and he
signaled his sons:

"Rest awhile, boys."

Frederick and Oliver sat down on a pile of logs. Salmon and Owen, at
a nod from their father, wandered carelessly toward the stable and
outhouses.

Owen found the dog Doyle had brought from Virginia and took pains to
make friends with him.

Brown's keen, restless eyes carefully inspected the door, its fastenings
and the strength of its hinges. The iron of the hinges was flimsy. The
fastening was the old-fashioned wooden shutters hung outside and closed
with a single slide. He noted with a quick glance that there was no
cross bar of heavy wood nor any sockets in which such a bar could be
dropped.

The windows were small. There was no glass. Solid wooden shutters hung
outside and closed with a single hook and eye for fastenings.

The sun was setting before the surveying party stopped work. They
had run a line close to the house of every Southern settler on the
Pottawattomie Creek, noting carefully every path leading to each house.
They had carefully mapped the settlement and taken a census of every
male inhabitant and every dog attached to each house. They also made an
inventory of the horses, saddles and bridles.

Having completed their strange errand, they packed their instruments and
rode toward Osawatomie.



CHAPTER XVI


With the opening of the Territory of Kansas the first Regiment of United
States Cavalry, commanded by Colonel E.V. Sumner, had been transferred
to Fort Leavenworth.

The life of the barracks was young Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart.

Colonel Lee had been transferred from West Point to the command of the
Second United States Cavalry on the Mexican Border at the same time that
Stuart's regiment was moved to Kansas.

The rollicking song-loving, banjo-playing Virginian had early
distinguished himself as an Indian fighter. He had been dangerously
wounded, but recovered with remarkable rapidity. His perfect health and
his clean habits stood him in good stead on the day an Indian's bullet
crashed through his breast.

He was a favorite with officers and men. As a cadet he had given promise
of the coming soldier. At the Academy he was noted for his strict
attendance to every military duty, and his erect, soldierly bearing. He
was particularly noted for an almost thankful acceptance of a challenge
to fight any cadet who might feel himself aggrieved. The boys called him
a "Bible Class Man." He was never known to swear or drink. They also
called him "Beauty Stuart," in good natured boyish teasing.

He was the best-looking cadet of his class, as he was the best-looking
young officer of his regiment. His hair was a reddish brown. His eyes a
deep steel blue, his voice clear and ringing.

In his voice the soul of the man spoke t

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