by John Jakes
If my father regrets anything deeply, I suspect it is the stormy temper which plagued him during his early years. I can never forget his quiet confession about taking the life of a man named Walpole, a man involved in a scheme to seize control of the Boston printing firm my great-grandfather Kent founded. My father set fire to the firm to leave the schemers nothing but ashes, then fled the city of Boston with his young female cousin.
The confession took place one night when I was thirteen or fourteen, my father saying I was at last old enough to hear the story. I can still see him reclining in our tepee that evening while my mother sewed him a new hide shirt.
I see his sun-lightened yellow hair streaking to gray, and his thick-knuckled fingers, stiff from the cold beaver streams, turning and turning his one tangible reminder of his younger days—a fob medallion struck for him by his father’s half brother, Gilbert Kent, who operated the firm for a time. The medal bore the family symbol, and a Latin motto—Cape locum et fac vestigium. Take a stand and make a mark.
The former my father felt he had done. He had put the past behind him forever, and ventured into the far west, both to make a new life and to search—fruitlessly as it turned out—for his cousin, Gilbert’s orphaned daughter, whom he lost to an abductor in Tennessee in 1814. As to the latter—making a mark—my father openly doubted his success.
Because my father speaks of the past as closed—an indication, perhaps, that its memory still holds a power to hurt him—I have felt it kinder never to write him about my two visits to Boston while I was studying at the Institute. I not only saw the house on fashionable Beacon Street where my father lived—a house now occupied by an unknown family—but I also saw, rebuilt, a publishing company called Kent and Son.
What called all this to mind is a volume I discovered among the guidebooks in the stalls—an expensive and obviously new edition of a currently popular historical romance by the Frenchman, Dumas. The book is entitled The Three Musketeers. The spine was damaged, no doubt accounting for the volume’s presence in the bin.
I opened the book, smitten by a most ungodly urge to read something other than Holy Scripture. There on the title page was the family device which my father carried on the obverse of his medal—the partially filled bottle of tea. Accompanying the symbol were the words Kent and Son. I located the date of publication. 1844. The firm still survives.
Before I replaced the novel, I briefly entertained the idea of sending it to my father with my next, long overdue letter. I decided against it for the same reason I said nothing about my discoveries in Boston. To hide the truth from a man who prized his family heritage and saw it lost, remains, I believe, the most Christian and compassionate course.
Later. Did I do right about the book? I am so unsure of everything, though I try to let no one see. Only these private pages, an outlet for my turmoil now and for my hopes and apprehensions during the past two years, know of my misgivings—only these pages, and Him Who Sees All.
May He have mercy on my weakness and my doubt.
•
June the 1st. All compromise has failed. The will of the Conference majority has proved paramount. A substitute resolution, requesting Bishop Andrew to cease his ecclesiastical function, was adopted one hundred ten to sixty-eight. Having spent a sleepless night in which I prayed almost continuously, and recognizing that I may have committed a grave sin, I abandoned my earlier flirtation with the majority and cast my vote nay.
I did so with the image of my dear Fan’s face in my thoughts. When I was assigned the itinerancy in Virginia, I took the people as my own. I discovered my wife among them, and even though God may one day judge them sinners despite their professions of conversion, I cannot condemn them. I chose to stand with them.
In this perhaps I erred. But I am somewhat comforted because I do not believe my beloved mother would see it so.
The Shoshoni are a remarkable people. During the years my mother and I wandered with my father, first with his partner, Weatherby, and then with my father alone after Weatherby perished of the small pox, many of my mother’s spiritual beliefs were implanted in my mind, forever coloring my imperfect understanding of Christian tenets.
The Shoshoni do not deny the existence of evil. They only hold a unique view of its source. To my mother and her race, the evil man was not merely sinful, but deranged—a subtle yet important distinction. The man who carried out some heinous act was obviously not in full possession of his God-given reason. Had he been, he would have recognized that his behavior was harmful to himself and, by extension, harmful to the tribal community. Patience and moral instruction, not punishment, were the remedies for such behavior. Perhaps it is from a secret, all but unadmitted faith in my mother’s principles that I turned from the shrill posturings of Hodding and the others of the anti-Andrew faction and sided with the slaveholding bishop and, therefore, with those to whom I minister. Perhaps I acted from an unvoiced belief that, if we have sinned collectively, we can one day come to understand our derangement and correct it.
It may be a vain hope. I pray it is not an excuse for cowardice.
Many at the Conference yearned for compromise, but that longing was frustrated by the vote. Lovick Pierce of Georgia has declared the southern Conferences will lodge a “manly, ministerial and proper protest” concerning the Andrew affair. I have this very night heard talk of the form the protest will take: Separation. The sundering of the Church into two bodies, north and south.
•
June the 2nd. The Conference winds to its grievous end; I will begin my homeward journey tomorrow. Even the name of my lovely little town in Virginia has become as ashes in my mouth—for I have not been able to escape the memory that, near another Lexington, my great-grandfather first stood with those country marksmen who dared to pledge their lives to the promise of liberty which this nation represents.
But liberty for whom? Whispers the worm of conscience now that the vote is done. I could not rest all night, seeing faces of color scorning me for rejecting their cause. My mind is a maelstrom. Is the agitation I suddenly feel on behalf of black men and women a temptation of the Devil, to divert me from my chief task of redeeming souls? What of the souls of my own kind in Lexington?
In the gloomy hours before dawn, I wrestled afresh with these questions—and Heaven saw fit to deny me an answer. This morning I encountered Hodding. He did not speak. His glance d—d me for lack of courage. Yet even that bothers me less than what his loathing suddenly portended.
After he hurried on, I saw with utter clarity that we must discover a solution to repair this terrible schism. A solution both sides can accept—and one which will deal properly and fairly with the person of color as well. That the black man has a soul the Church does not deny. That he is entitled to be a communicant of American liberty is what tears us asunder. Whether that idea is right, or only an aberration, the side ultimately found to be in error must be persuaded to admit and amend its error.
Who will lead us in a search for truth and accord? Who will speak reason and effect the means of escape from our dilemma? Unless such means are found, I fear passions will rise even as they rose during the dreadful business in St. Louis in ’36, when white hysteria inspired by the columns of the Congregationalist Lovejoy’s anti-slavery paper, The Observer, led to all manner of mistreatment of Negroes, and to the death of a poor black riverman the mob caught, chained to a tree and burned alive. Hodding has self-righteously recalled the incident to me on more than one occasion—as well as the fate of Lovejoy himself, who fled to free soil in Alton, Illinois, only to be killed by five bullets while another hysterical mob wrecked his fourth printing press.
Such damaging passions are present north and south. How often have I heard Captain Tunworth speak fearfully of the deranged Turner? The slave led perhaps as many as one hundred of his fellows on a rampage throughout Virginia’s Southampton County in ’31, slaughtering fifty-seven white persons, including women and children. Captain Tunworth swears the black man is a beast,
to be chained for the protection of society. He says he would die defending that view.
So where is the answer? Passion is rampant on both sides. I have seen that here, in a meeting of men purportedly pledged not to animosity but to its antithesis—compassionate love. Will God show us the path soon, after we have endured His testing and renewed our vow to follow His Son’s teachings? Or has He already abandoned us in rage and sorrow because we are so blind, so incapable of governing our passions, and bringing Christian order from them?
Should God turn aside from us, will not the Federal Union find itself in the same wretched state as the Church does today? Irretrievably sundered? Should that transpire, the prospect is holocaust—for we preachers, contentious as we may be, still waged our little war this month with debate and document and resolution. Even with a gulf now opened between northern and southern Conferences, a modicum of Christian love remains for the brethren on the other side—
Will men outside the Church feel that restraining affection?
I fear not.
Later. I have reread what I wrote earlier. I am humiliated and ashamed and increasingly filled with dread.
How can there be hope of a solution if even men of Christ have come this far, failing to find it? I go back to Virginia not only wondering whether I have done the right thing, but whether these thirty troubled days are but a harbinger of much worse to come.
A man such as my father-in-law, Captain Tunworth, will not yield. The abolitionists still thunder with the ancient Roman jurist, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!” Above the whole tumult rings the black man’s anguished cry.
Those who seek a middle ground may be cursed and shouldered aside. I feel it—Almighty God, I feel it terribly—
Still later—en route. Very hard to write, coach bouncing, and my hand unsteady. So distressed was I during my last hours in the City, I forgot to buy a bright trinket for my little boy Gideon. I fear I am bringing him instead a legacy of much darker hue.
* Book Two *
Gold
Chapter I
Cry in the Wilderness
i
ON A BRILLIANT MORNING in the second week of April 1848, the clipper Manifest Destiny sailed into the bay, having been en route from the hongs of Canton an intolerable sixty-two days. The clipper dropped anchor opposite the settlement of Yerba Buena, a straggling collection of frame and adobe buildings set near the water against the background of the southern peninsula’s grassy hills.
The ship was owned by the Ball Brothers Line, New York. She had slid off the ways only two years before, christened by her builders in a burst of patriotic zeal. In the pages of The Democratic Review, Mr. O’Sullivan had referred to the nation’s steady expansion toward the Pacific as a “manifest destiny.” The words had caught the fancy of Congressmen and China traders alike.
At thirteen hundred and sixty tons, Manifest Destiny was a lean and beautiful vessel. But as her canvas came down, and a lighter operated by the local hide merchant put out from the beach, her captain was still cursing her roundly. He had hoped for a straight, swift passage from China, around the Horn and up to New York. Like most captains of clipper ships—so called because their construction helped them clip time from existing speed records—he was always trying to beat some other skipper’s performance. His current target was the seventy-eight-day mark of Captain Waterman’s extreme clipper Rainbow, set in ’45. He didn’t like Waterman. Few in the China trade did, including Waterman’s crewmen, who had nicknamed him Killer.
A typhoon in the South China Sea—a freak storm, blowing months after the fall season—had nearly dismantled Manifest Destiny’s masts as she started her homeward run. The damage forced her back to Macao for a refitting. With the chance for a record—and the resulting prestige and increased business for Ball Brothers—gone, the cupper’s captain had decided to concentrate on profit.
Manifest Destiny had called at the Hawaiian Islands, adding another two tons of Alaskan sealskins to the sixteen thousand tons of tea already in the holds. The clipper then set sail for Yerba Buena, the sunny little port on the California coast. Here the captain would squeeze aboard whatever hides and tallow were available. The captain’s primage was calculated at a generous seven and one half percent of the delivered sale price of the cargo. Since he was already far behind schedule, the more he brought home without making the clipper plow under, the greater his earnings.
Yerba Buena had one other attraction besides the possibility of extra cargo. As the lighter headed for shore, the captain began to think of that, and with considerable pleasure. It took his mind off his anger at the ship, the weather and himself.
The captain sat in the fighter’s bow, the oilskin-wrapped parcel from New York tucked under one sleeve of his trim blue sea jacket. He wore a peaked cap and his best black silk neckerchief. He was a tall, slim man with a sharp chin and gray eyes that tended to intimidate those who served under him. Though he was just forty, white hair already showed around his ears. His name was Barton McGill. His home—birthplace, rather—was Charleston, South Carolina.
While the lighter plowed through the chop, he scanned the small crowd gathering on shore. Such a crowd always formed when a ship of size entered the roads. The permanent population of Yerba Buena was right around five hundred, perhaps half of those being Americans. Even at some distance from the beach, Bart McGill could easily spot the Yankees. The darker ones were Coloma Indians, Mexicans, Chileans and Peruvians. There were even a few Hawaiians in the village. He saw white and colored waving with equal enthusiasm, heard halloos across the water—
Then, approximately in the center of the crowd, he spied an extremely tall, yellow-skinned Negro. Bart McGill’s eyes were momentarily cool. He and Israel didn’t get along too well. But the Negro’s height helped the captain spot the person he really wanted to see—
Sure enough, there was Amanda. Standing a little to one side of Israel, and waving. A few steps behind her was her son Louis, recognizable because of his size—he was eleven—and his jet black hair.
Goddamnedest thing in the world, finding someone like her in this penny-ante port, Bart thought, smiling. He’d been married twelve years to a proper Charleston bitch who had borne him three daughters, none of whom had survived infancy. At last the bitch had done the decent thing and left him a widower while he was somewhere in the Indian Ocean in ’43. But he’d had to visit California two years ago to discover a woman he really cared for, a woman older than he was—most miraculous of all, a woman who didn’t want to knot him up in matrimony.
He didn’t call often at Yerba Buena. But everyone knew Amanda was Captain McGill’s woman, as well as the proprietor of Kent’s, a tavern and eating house on Portsmouth Square—where, he noticed as he squinted into the sunlight, the stars and stripes still appeared to be flying.
Commander Montgomery had sent that banner up the staff for the first time in ’46, when the Americans in California heard the news of their country’s war with Mexico. That same year, a treaty with Britain had settled the disputed northern boundary of Oregon not at the fifty-fourth parallel but the forty-ninth. With a potential enemy out of the way, the United States had turned its attention to a real one. Provoked by the annexation of Texas, Mexican soldiers had attacked a U.S. dragoon company near Matamoros, and the war was on—
Realizing how out of touch he was, Bart McGill turned to one of the oarsmen. “Did General Scott capture Mexico City last fall? I sailed right after he took Chapultepec—”
“Yes, sir, Captain, he did. The greasers done signed a treaty, too. I heard Washington got all o’ Texas, New Mexico and Upper Californy. Guess it’s true—”
“Which was practically American anyway after the Bear Flag revolt and General Kearny’s capture of Los Angeles,” Bart said in his mellow southerner’s voice. “Will California come into the Union, then?”
“Too soon to tell,” the oarsman answered. “The treaty ain’t more’n a couple of months old. Can’t see much reason why the
Union’d want us, either,” he added. He bent forward and drew back on his oar.
Bart McGill turned his gaze inland, to the green and tan hills receding to the distant bluish haze that might have been only a haze—or the great Sierras. The land was indeed desolate, a wilderness—though he’d heard there was good hunting in the Sierra foothills. He wondered about the territory’s status if, at some remote time in the far future, it acquired enough people to entitle it to statehood. The request would touch off another debate about slavery, no doubt. Being a southerner, he had views on the subject of slavery. But he much preferred the sea to the settled east because he got sick of hearing nigra, nigra, nigra. In New York, nobody could talk for half an hour without launching an argument over the south’s peculiar institution.
“Bart? Here we are!”
The faint cry borne on the breeze took him away from the tedious and disagreeable subject. A couple of Mexicans with cornets began tootling a welcome. There was some desultory cheering. But the crowd seemed skimpy, even for Yerba Buena.
His eye fixed on Amanda—forty-five years old and looking ten years less. God, what a handsome woman. If only she’d been able to conceive a child. But her time for that had ended relatively early—before he met her.
She strained on tiptoe, her dyed cotton dress a sparkle of red amid the drab rags of most of the other inhabitants. Her son Louis wore a flannel shirt and homespun trousers. Bart didn’t even notice what Israel, the tall mulatto, was wearing. He was concentrating on the vibrant, dark-haired woman who kicked off her shoes and dashed to the water’s edge, awaiting the lighter.