Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  Johnny Shawnessy, twenty-one years old, cast his first vote that day. He had never seen such wild excitement in the Square. As the dimensions of the Republican victory gradually became clear from reports pouring in from other parts of the land, the elation in Freehaven mounted until it broke all bounds.

  One of the great moments in Johnny’s life came on the night when Lincoln’s victory was assured and had been posted in the windows of the Free Enquirer office. Johnny and Niles Foster were standing at the door watching a Liberty Parade go around and around the Square waving banners, shouting Republican songs, ringing cowbells. Thousands of people were weeping, laughing, singing.

  —We helped cause this, John, Niles said. I guess we have a right to enjoy it.

  —We want Foster! We want Foster! the crowd chanted. And then,

  —We want Johnny! We want Johnny!

  A dozen hands reached out and lifted the two men up. They rode around the Square in the light of the victory bonfires. When Johnny finally managed to get back on his feet, dozens of men came up and shook his hand, and women hugged and kissed him.

  In the midst of this emotional frenzy, outdoing even the Great Revival of ’58, Johnny came face to face with Nell Gaither. She had apparently been marching with the crowd. Her furcollared coat—for it was a chilly evening—was pulled close around her chin. Her bonnet was knocked awry, and strands of her bright hair had come down. Her cheeks were streaked as though she had been crying. Her eyes were full of green excitement.

  —Hello, Johnny, she said. Isn’t it wonderful!

  —Sure is, Nell.

  They stood in the crowd unconsciously gripping each other’s hands and arms, both trembling with excitement. They hadn’t seen each other since Johnny’s marriage.

  —How is—how is everything with you, Nell?

  —Just fine, she said. Johnny, you have a beard.

  —I know it, Johnny said. We—we change.

  —How is everything with you, Johnny?

  —Just fine.

  —I’m so glad, Nell said. Well, I guess this is a good time to say good-by, Johnny.

  —Good-by?

  —Yes, I’m going back East, Nell said. To stay with Mamma’s people.

  —O, I’m sorry, he said, without sufficient thought.

  The crowd was all gone for him. The Election was forgotten. The bonfires had died away. The hundreds of faces pressing around him, shouting and singing, were all phantoms and unreal. Johnny touched his beard and smiled his wistful, affectionate smile.

  —As the Professor would say, he said, I guess it’s time for a little quotation, if I can lay my tongue to one. In the words of that dear book, which you inscribed to me, Nell, Fare thee well! and if forever——

  —Still for ever, fare thee well, Nell said, smiling her bright smile.

  Her hands tightened on his arms, and his on hers, and they let go of each other, and smiling, both were lost in the vast, victorious crowd that wound endlessly around the Court House Square.

  Of course, there was an awakening from all this jubilation, as Johnny had known there would be. Raintree County had scarcely been elated by the news of Lincoln’s victory when it was shocked by news of another kind. The Southern States were quitting the Union. Secession started with South Carolina and spread fast, engulfing, one after another, the great names below the Mason and Dixon line. Federal forts and arsenals were seized. Southern orators began to proclaim the New Republic in sonorous, confident phrases. They were through with the old Union, and they offered to the North peace or a sword. In contrast, the Northern leaders seemed pitiably inept. President Buchanan and his expiring administration watched impotently as the breach widened. The President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, whiled away his time in Springfield, Illinois, saying nothing much except that he expected the Union to hold together. Johnny began to doubt the wisdom of the political compromise whereby an obscure, untried Westerner had become President of the Republic in her most critical hour. In Raintree County, there was a feeling of complete paralysis, which deepened as weeks and months passed. The Republic appeared to be mortally wounded without ever having begun to bleed.

  On February 18, Jefferson Davis became the President of the Southern Confederacy. In the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, an island fortress called Fort Sumter became a stormcenter of discussion as it continued to hold out with a small Federal garrison while the South demanded its surrender. Everywhere in the North men were asking themselves the same terrible questions: Would Sumter be evacuated by the incoming administration and a clear case of Northern acquiescence to the seceding states be established? Would Lincoln be inaugurated on March 4? Would there be a capital in which such a ceremony could take place? Would Washington, D. C., an old Southern City, remain a part of the Union? Would Virginia, lingering and indecisive, go with the seceding states? What would become of the border states between North and South, like Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri? What of the Far West, which the South was trying to win to its banners?

  On February 11, Abraham Lincoln left Springfield for Washington. A little less than a month later, the new President was inaugurated at Washington without bloodshed. Johnny took some heart from the tone of the President’s inaugural. He hoped that Lincoln’s wise plea for reconciliation would be hearkened to, but in the following weeks no overt act, either of violence or concession, occurred on either side to change the situation. The most exciting headlines continued to feature Fort Sumter, still holding out in Charleston Harbor. The newspapers were filled with contradictory rumors: The Federal troops were to be withdrawn. They were to be reinforced. They had been bribed. Lincoln had sold out the Republic. Lincoln would stand firm. The South would give in after certain concessions to her hurt pride. The South was secretly preparing to attack the North. No one knew anything for certain, and everyone had a different idea as to what ought to be done.

  In Raintree County, Indiana, the voice of compromise was louder all the time. Even Johnny Shawnessy felt the infection. For his part, he was married to a Southern woman, he had spent some time in the South, and he understood better than most people in the County the sectional pride of the Southerners, the things they were saying, their old, compelling dream. Besides, he had personal problems that left him precious little emotion to expend on the Republic.

  Susanna was coming to her time.

  One day late in March, Johnny met T. D. and Ellen on the Square. He hadn’t seen them for several weeks. When they asked him how Susanna was, he said,

  —All right, I guess.

  —You’re expecting around the middle of April? T. D. said.

  —Yes.

  —Well, don’t worry, my boy. Having a baby’s the most natural thing in the world. By the way, if you need us for anything, just call.

  —Sure, Johnny said.

  He smiled and talked a little with his parents about the national situation, toward which T. D. took a hopeful view. Johnny said good-by, still smiling to reassure them.

  He didn’t tell them about Susanna’s absolute refusal to let T. D. have anything to do with the case. He didn’t tell them how she had been pleading with him to let her have the baby without medical assistance. He didn’t tell them how Susanna kept to her bed almost constantly, except when she wandered forlornly in the upper rooms of the house. He didn’t tell them how he had awakened a few nights before to find her gone from the bed and had discovered her on the top floor leaning from an open window, looking down fixedly at stone steps dropping steeply to the street two floors below. He didn’t tell them how he had hardly slept at all lately, for fear of some violence she might do herself. He didn’t tell them how she lay in her bed restlessly stroking her throat and watching him with scared eyes, while together,

  IN THE HOUSE ABOVE THE SQUARE

  THEY WENT ON WAITING,

  WAITING,

  —WAITING for the War to start, the Perfessor said, was one of the most exhausting ordeals this nation ever had. Sumter was a positive relief. I was reporting it for the
Dial, you know, and I saw the iron seed sown in Charleston Harbor.

  —Speaking of Sumter, the Senator said, resuming his seat before the General Store, it illustrates my point. Do you realize that the casus belli of the Civil War didn’t occur until the sainted Sucker had held office for over a month and after seven Southern States had seceded! Lincoln was either cowardly or inept.

  —Sumter! the Perfessor said. How in your theory of history, John, do you encompass this bloody name on which the Republic foundered? Take away the flagwaving and the patriot shrieks, and what do you have?—a few hundred iron balls bounding on brick walls from which a dyed rag fluttered! For this, the Republic resorted to four years of mass murder. And all from a word—Sumter!

  —The whole Nineteenth Century willed Sumter, Mr. Shawnessy said. Lincoln was merely a wise doctor to Time’s bloody birth. He knew that he couldn’t prevent the physical fact of Sumter, but he gave moral direction to the Event. If you want to understand Sumter, go behind it to Lincoln coming across the Nation to Washington in the days before his inauguration. Listen to the voice of this ungainly Western lawyer speaking to crowds in the railway stations, outdoor assemblies, and torchlit halls. Once he said:

  If the great American People only keep their temper both sides of the line, the trouble will come to an end, and the question which now distracts the Country be settled, just as surely as all other difficulties, of a like character, which have originated in this Government, have been adjusted.

  —That illustrates Lincoln’s lack of sand, the Senator said. Goddammit, the War was inevitable. A fighting President wouldn’t have made such a Christlike martyr in retrospect, but he’d have got the War over with sooner. Jefferson Davis was no genius, God knows, but even he was an abler man than Lincoln. I said so then. I say so now.

  —Read the Inaugurals, Mr. Shawnessy said. Davis did a mediocre piece of sword-rattling. Lincoln said:

  Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective Sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our Country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.

  —You know, the Perfessor said, I have an idea that Lincoln’s fondness for this marital image was caused by bitter personal experience. Death had surely no sting for a man who had to bear the American Civil War publicly and Mary Todd Lincoln privately.

  —Lincoln was really a sordid fellow, the Senator said. What does it do for the hero-image people have of Lincoln when you think of this big, ugly, rawboned bastard getting into his dirty nightgown every night and going to bed with that crazy little fat chattering bitch, Mary Todd!

  The Senator wheezed with laughter and bit savagely at the end of his cigar.

  —By God, I’ve always hated Abe Lincoln, he said, and still do. He’s the cross I have had to bear for becoming a Republican.

  —Your hate, Garwood, Mr. Shawnessy said, trying to keep emotion from his voice, is part of the great human enigma of Abraham Lincoln. Out of those stale bedrooms filled with the nagging spirit of Mary Todd Lincoln and out of smokefilled law offices where men cursed and told dirty stories and discussed old trials, came somehow the mind that distilled the First Inaugural. How do you explain the wise, tragic tolerance that Lincoln alone showed, of all the leaders North and South?

  I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad Land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  He said the last words hastily in a low voice. Unexpectedly, as he spoke them, he had beheld the President. Lincoln stood on a platform erected from the steps of the Capitol in Washington. The living light of time sculptured the lined face, coarse black hair, long body in a lank black suit. This man had been.

  —Lincoln, the Perfessor said. What is Lincoln? Who knows? Lincoln is one of your Events, John, that we together, good mythmakers all, have labored to build.

  The three men smoked inscrutably. Firecrackers burst in the Street of Waycross. Faces, wheels, hooves passed on the National Road.

  In the Garwood B. Jones Period of the Republic, let us remember the great names of our youth. Hail and Farewell!

  Abraham Lincoln is a photograph by Brady. Or a memory in the mind of an old, old citizen, whose eyes are gleety with the gray discharge of time. Or a mist of print in old newspapers stored in the tombs of great metropolitan libraries. In these we touch the man Lincoln, the seamy, memoryhaunted face, the fabulous flesh of Sangamon County, Illinois, Spencer County, Indiana, Hardin County, Kentucky.

  Where are the days of the life of Abraham Lincoln?

  They are yours, Republic! They are yours, American earth dense with the roots of prairie grass! They are yours, mythjetting Time, in which the centuries go and go in ranks of streaming headlines.

  What was the man Abraham Lincoln?

  He was a memory and a hundred thousand memories, mostly of the earth.

  He was a memory of the western earth, its clay-dissolving rivers in the springtime, its red tobacco flats, the young saplings in the raw weather and their perfect buds of green, the wet flaw and shining mud of crude little roads from house to house in the early springtime. He was a memory of big trees felled for clearings, of hands handling the broadaxe. Trees fell crashing and were hewn into rails for fences. He was the memory of divisions of the prairie earth, of western names, the names of counties.

  Abraham Lincoln was a memory of Hardin County in Kentucky, of a cabin made of logs and clay, a cut between the hills, a spring and a running branch, of a mother whose name was a sound of the ancient English ancestry of these people. Abraham Lincoln was a memory of Nancy Hanks.

  Abraham Lincoln was a memory of Spencer County, Indiana, and how you got to Indiana by crossing the Ohio. Indiana was North-of-the-Ohio; it was the United States of America, and when you crossed the broad water you crossed from slave land into free. Indiana was the new nation in 1816, the people spilling westward, a free earth. In the rocky soil of southern Indiana, there were hills of small trees, there were ravines of rotten leaves, there were cold rains, it was a raw, wet country, winter and spring. Abraham Lincoln was the memory of days and ways in early Indiana. He was a memory of his mother’s thin, ruined body in the February earth of Spencer County.

  Abraham Lincoln was the memory of Sangamon County, Illinois, green fields, the prairie land divided by rivers. He was a memory of a young man’s strong desire of love and fame, he was the memory of a young man’s days and nights of dreaming and of learning out of books in leather bindings. He was the memory of a big strength looking for a weight to swing. He was the memory of girls’ faces against green lawns and going to the County Fair.

  Abraham Lincoln was a long memory of the American earth. And in the time of the testing of the Republic, the West gave Abraham Lincoln and his memories to the Nation. And we in turn, Humanity, give him down the Ages as a memorial of our culture, we give you his words and his memories, we offer you his long figure in the black suit to be placed in the mausoleum of the great, beside the few men who deserve to be remembered. We give you him to be remembered because he is all of us, being what we were and are, because we fashioned him, and he is like us when we are most like unto ourselves.

  —Every people has a rendezvous with destiny, the Perfessor was saying. After an Event happens, we get the feeling that it had been waiting there like an ambush. Sumter was the bloody ambush of the Nineteenth Century. I never have ceased to regret the Civil War. It’s silly of me, of course. Perhaps I ought to take the attitude of a character in one of Mrs. Stowe’s later novels: Wasn’t everything topsy-turvy for a time
! But the War was the end of a rather gentle, rich old life and the beginning of something nobody really wanted.

  —Spare the tears, Professor, the Senator said. As I see it, nothing great is accomplished in this world without letting a little blood.

  Yes, there shall be blood on the earth. There shall be a dark hour when men meet on the streets and shake their heads and hurriedly pass on. There shall be a dawn when the sun spouts blood on the fringe of night.

  —So we came to Sumter, the Perfessor said. For better or for worse.

  So we came to Sumter. So we came to Sumter down all our different ways. So we came down streets of old American cities and down the roads of countless summertimes and on the swollen backs of rivers, and at last, at last, we came to Sumter. So we came through the days of our strong, blithe youth, we heard the voices of the talkers talking from the platforms erected in the clearings, we heard the voices ringing in the liberty parades, we were not afraid, we marched with long legs swinging into step, rawboned, greatchested, with fiercely tender smiles, with hornloud laughs and lips that talked of beauty, whiskey, tobacco, and the Rights of Man.

  So we came to Sumter. We came, our name was legion, we came, we had been coming. We had been coming there for fifty years. We had been moving there and never knew it. When we crossed the Alleghenies and struck across the forests of Ohio, we were coming. When we poled our flatboats down the western rivers to the Gulf and saw the big hands sold at auction on the blocks, and the girls with ebon thighs and the planters with white appraising fingers, we were coming on our way, we were on our way to Sumter. When we crossed the burning plains, when our wagons shrugged and staggered in the passes, when we reached the far slope thin and dying and demanding food, we were coming down to Sumter.

  When we laid the rails across the prairie, when we put the bridge across the river, when we rolled at forty miles per hour down the grade, we were coming down to Sumter.

  When we lay together in the dark, my unforgotten darling, when the rose of love was blooming in the dark, because we both were mortal, when we touched our bodies in the night and made that fatal crossing of the seed of North and South, when we lay dreaming by each other in the night so long and long, my darling, we were coming down to Sumter. O, Susanna, do not cry for me, we were coming down to Sumter