“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“Don’t thank me. We haven’t accomplished a damn thing yet. If you run into trouble in South Carolina, contact a man named Joel Poinsett. He’s just gotten himself kicked out of Mexico for trying to buy Texas at my orders. He’s been writing me about the damnable politics of South Carolina.”
In two hours George and Hannibal were steaming down the Potomac aboard the Somers, armed with a federal subpoena signed by an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Caroline had no doubt that Chief Marshal Wyden had reported what was happening to John C. Calhoun—which filled her with foreboding. She feared George was about to become part of the growing animosity between the president and the vice president. Her Washington life seemed to be whirling out of control. She rushed to the Polks’ rooms at Gadsby’s Hotel and told them the latest developments.
“I wish George had gotten a letter from Vice President Calhoun,” Sarah said.
“Why?”
“From what we’ve been hearing, it would have more weight in South Carolina than a federal subpoena,” James Polk said.
TWO
THE STEAM FRIGATE SOMERS, STRUGGLING through mountainous winter seas, passed Fort Sumter, the squat, casemated guardian of Charleston Harbor, at 2 P.M. on its third day out from Alexandria. George and Hannibal had been violently seasick for the entire voyage. George gazed at the faded pinks of the old houses fronting the broad harbor and thought Charleston was one of the most civilized-looking cities he had ever seen. But the harbor was devoid of ships, and grass was in fact growing in several streets, between rows of bristling yucca and palmetto trees. Senator Hayne’s doleful description at Vice President Calhoun’s dinner party had not been an exaggeration.
They tied up at a wharf in the U.S. Navy Yard and stumbled ashore. At the imposing Customs House, the collector of customs, a tall, cadaverous man named Richard Laurens, presided over an office full of dust-covered books and records. He said the ship Fortunate Pilgrim had not yet arrived.
When George explained why he was interested, Laurens looked grave. “I would keep your purpose here quiet, if I were you.”
“Why?”
“Federal subpoenas aren’t popular in South Carolina.”
At the city’s chief hotel, the wide-porched Palmetto House, George was told Hannibal would have to sleep in the cellar with the slaves of other guests. He would also have to eat with them. Hannibal assured George he did not mind. George gave him a note to Joel Poinsett and headed for the dining room, hoping to eat some food that would remain in his stomach. For want of company, he bought a newspaper. He was astonished by its account of the debate between Senators Hayne and Webster. Hayne was described as the clear winner. Webster’s apostrophes to the Union were dismissed as “sputterings of a defective July 4th rocket.”
“Congressman Stapleton?”
George gazed at a short, swarthy, slender man whose gaunt face might have peered from a sepulchre. Did everyone in Charleston have one foot in the grave? “I’m Joel Poinsett. Anyone who summons me in Andrew Jackson’s name gets my immediate attention. What can I do for you?”
George told him of his errand. Poinsett looked even graver than Collector of the Port Laurens. “This is delicate. It could lead to a public disturbance of rather large proportions.”
“Why in the world?”
“Nullification fever is running wild here in Charleston. The complication of secession is only a step behind it. Add slavery to the mixture and you have an almost guaranteed explosion.”
“We’re talking about a crime. A simple, brutal crime.”
“A crime purportedly committed in Washington, D.C. Do you really expect this trader to confess? He’ll deny everything. My advice is to press no charges. Simply take the poor kidnapped creature if she’s on the ship and clear out of here.”
George shook his head. “I intend to see justice done.”
“You may end up endangering her safety as well as your own and her husband’s.”
“Do you have a federal attorney here?”
“Of course. I’ll be glad to take you to him.”
George bolted down a hasty meal of southern-fried chicken and hominy grits and followed Poinsett to the federal attorney’s office. His name was Graves and he lived up to it. A short, heavyset man, he looked harassed and weary. He almost groaned when he saw George’s subpoena. “I’m to serve this?”
“Isn’t that your job?” George said.
“I’ve been thinking of resigning this office. I’m tired of being insulted on the street whenever I go out in public. This thing could get my house burned down—or me thrown into the harbor.”
“I’ll serve it,” George said. “You won’t have to say a word.”
George paced the porch of the Palmetto House for the next three days, waiting for the Fortunate Pilgrim. Evenings he spent in Joel Poinsett’s elegant house or in the houses of his friends. The Georgian doorways With fluted columns opening into long, shaded galleries, the mock-India wallpaper, and the Doric pilasters reminded him of Bowood. Charleston reeked of history. The talk he heard over the dinner tables and afterward in the drawing rooms was equally historic—about the clash of the glorious American past with the ominous present. Joel Poinsett and his friends were a beleaguered dwindling minority—the supporters of the Union.
George liked-many of them and they liked him, especially when they learned he too had a lineage, a grandfather who had sat with their grandfathers in the Continental Congress, a great-grandfather who had done war dances with the Seneca. But George saw them with the eyes of a man who had met Andrew Jackson and joined the political party he had created.
There was James Louis Petigru, a dumpy little man with a long head and squinting eyes, who was considered by some the greatest lawyer in America. He loved the Union, and he loved liberty, and had no confidence in the ability of the people to preserve either. There were the Huger cousins, Alfred and Daniel, each slender, tall, chiseled of feature, Grecian of mind. There was Thomas Grimke, “the walking dictionary,” whose heavy gait and ponderous frame seemed mirror images of the weighty articles he wrote in the Southern Review. When it came to practical politics, he was a blank page. The more they talked in their charming, acerbic, witty way, the more George began to regard these people as Southern versions of Washington Irving and Fenimore Gardiner and his mother’s New York friends, bewildered witnesses to the onward rush of democracy, as appalled—and frightened—as the French aristocracy of 1789.
For these Charlestonians, George Stapleton was a double specter—a Democrat and a spokesman for the burgeoning factory system that was enabling the North to grow immeasurably richer while the South grew remorselessly poorer. It was, one told him, a clash of civilizations, Rome versus Greece, Greece versus Persia, the Sung dynasty versus the Mongol barbarians. “We’re defending the past against the future here in Charleston,” one declared. “We intend to do it as long as possible.”
Joel Poinsett had another vision. He had spent the previous four years in Mexico as American ambassador. At President Andrew Jackson’s order, he had attempted to buy Texas. When the Mexicans refused to sell, he began bribing individual Mexican politicians and surreptitiously urging them to seize power. The Mexicans had thrown him out of the country. He had come home with a low opinion of Mexico as a nation. It was “all sail and no ship.” They were incapable of governing themselves. Americans should take Texas by force—and march on to Mexico City. Geography would guarantee that most of these conquering Americans would be Southerners. An empire was waiting there to restore the South to splendor and power.
Talk, George heard it all as nothing but talk by men caught in one of history’s ebb tides. Again and again, he silently thanked Caroline and Andrew Jackson for making him a man who faced toward the future, not the past. Even more often, he thought of Hannibal in the cellar of the Palmetto House, Tabitha in the hold of the Fortunate Pilgrim. When he asked these brilliant Charleston thinkers for advice, they retreated into ep
igrams and musings. They came close to disliking him for trying to lure them into the gritty details of the looming present.
At midday in private rooms at the Palmetto House, Joel Poinsett arranged for George to meet the other side, tense, angry young George McDuffie, aging Langdon Cleves, with a huge head and forehead on which a frown seemed permanently engraved—men who told him South Carolina was serious about nullification and, yes, secession. Next came Robert Barnwell Rhett, almost a caricature of a Southern gentleman, with flaring nostrils and squarish forehead, a battering ram of a man. He strode up to George on the porch of the Palmetto House at high noon on the third day, stabbed his cane into the floorboards, and said, “Why did that Tennessee barbarian send you here? To embarrass us? To make a legal case for settling an army on us? To frighten us? Tell him none of these will work. We’re past being embarrassed by your ilk. We’ll fight his army. We refuse to be frightened by him or anyone else.”
“In the name of God, sir,” George said, “I’m here as an individual.”
“Aboard a U.S. Navy ship.”
“That was the president’s decision. I would have hired a ship if necessary. I’m here to rescue a free woman—and punish a crime.”
“You’re here to challenge the doctrine of nullification, to abrogate before our eyes the right of a state to act as a free and independent republic! If not, why haven’t you taken your case to a Carolina court? Why, sir? Don’t you believe we too have a system of justice?”
“I have a subpoena from the U.S. Supreme Court. Obtained by the president of the United States. That’s all I need.”
“Mr. George!”
It was Hannibal, in the street. “They say it’s here. The Pilgrim ship.”
He pointed to the harbor. There, working her way past Fort Sumter, was a square-rigged brigantine. Sails taut, she made good headway toward the city’s empty wharves.
“Go to Mr. Poinsett. Tell him to bring the federal attorney,” George said. “Then go to the Somers. Tell them to get the ship ready to sail. Ask the captain and ten armed men to join me on the wharf.”
When he turned to continue his argument with Rhett, that gentleman was gone. George hurried down the broad, curving esplanade to the wharves. He was soon joined by an anxious Joel Poinsett, who told him that the federal attorney, Graves, had resigned as of last night. Commander Harrison Duane, the captain of the Somers, arrived with ten marines in blue-and-red uniforms. The commander was from Georgia. He had been polite and noncommittal on the voyage from Washington. George could only hope he was on his side.
Beyond the wharf, a huge crowd was beginning to gather. Off to one side, Robert Barnwell Rhett began haranguing them. George could only hear snatches of his rhetoric: “federal tyranny … Southern liberty … presidential plot.”
The Fortunate Pilgrim was soon warping against the sagging wharf, her sailors whipping hawsers around bollards, her sails being furled by the topmen. Down a crude gangplank came the captain and his chief passenger. George had the latter’s name on the subpoena. The federal marshals had acquired it from the port records of Alexandria.
“Are you Thomas Jefferson Glover?” George asked the man. He was a big, heavy-shouldered fellow, almost as tall as George. He had a black whip struck in the waistband of his pants.
“That’s me.”
“You’re under arrest for the kidnapping of Tabitha Flowers.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Under the authority stated here by the president of the United States, we have the right to search this ship for this woman. She’s a free woman of color who was kidnapped by you or your confederates in Washington, D.C.”
George said this in a voice loud enough to carry far into the crowd on the street around the dock. “I repeat, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Glover said. “I’m a citizen of South Carolina. I don’t pay no attention to federal subpoenas once I’m in my native state. You try to search this ship and you’ll get this whip around your neck and this knife in your belly.”
He pulled the whip from his waistband and drew a knife with his other hand.
“You’d be well advised to do nothing of the sort,” said Commander Duane of the Somers. “If we overtook you on the high seas, as we had hoped to do, we would have searched you there. As long as your ship is in the water, I have orders from the president of the United States to search it and I intend to carry them out.”
“The hell with the president of the United States!” Glover shouted.
A cheer rose from the crowd on the esplanade.
“I’m going up that gangplank. If you try to strike me with that whip or cut me with that knife, you’ll wind up in the water with a broken neck,” George said.
He seized Glover by the shoulder and flung him aside. Commander Duane drew his sword and put the hilt against Glover’s chest. “Don’t move,” he said.
On the deck of the Fortunate Pilgrim, George grabbed the first sailor he met. He turned out to be the second mate. “Where’s Tabitha Flowers?”
“What’s she look like?”
“Light tan. About seven months pregnant.”
“Oh, her. You’ll find her in the stern section.”
George turned. “Hannibal. She’s here.”
Hannibal sprinted up the gangplank. The second mate led the way to the stern section. They descended into gloom filled with an incredible stench. In the half-light they saw about two dozen black men and women in manacles, behind a set of iron bars that stretched from port to starboard, creating a cage. The deck, really the ship’s bottom, was covered by about a foot of straw. Apparently they used this for a bed—and a toilet.
“Tabitha?” Hannibal called.
There was no response from anyone inside the cage.
“Tabitha!” Hannibal screamed.
“Open this lock,” George said to the second mate.
He began fumbling through a set of keys. “Tabitha!” Hannibal cried again, clutching the bars.
“She’s dead,” said a voice in the dark rear of the cage.
The second mate had the door open. Hannibal burst in ahead of George. They floundered over the manacled bodies in the straw. The stench made George want to vomit. Hannibal sank to his knees. “Tabitha,” he said. This time it was a groan. He picked up the inert form and clutched it to his chest. “Tabitha,” he said, sobs wracking his huge frame.
“I got the baby,” said the same voice from the darkness.
His eyes adjusted to the dark by now, George managed to make out a young black woman crouched in the corner. She had something wrapped in a cloth against her breasts.
“What’s your name?” George said.
“Mercy.”
He turned to the mate. “Get her shackles off. She’s coming with us.” The mate obeyed without any argument.
George floundered back to Hannibal. “Bring Tabitha with us. We’ll take her home.”
Hannibal picked up Tabitha and followed George and the mate up the ladder to the open deck. A gasp swept through the crowd when they saw Hannibal carrying Tabitha’s body. When Mercy and the baby appeared, even the most slow-witted in the crowd, which now numbered well over a thousand, realized what had happened. Robert Barnwell Rhett fell silent.
George descended the gangplank and pointed at Thomas Jefferson Glover. “I want this man arrested for murder!” he shouted. He turned to an aghast Commander Duane. “Take him in custody.”
Joel Poinsett seized George’s arm. “You’ll never get him through that crowd to the Somers. Let the state authorities arrest him and try him here.”
“He’s going to be tried in Washington, D.C., where he committed this crime,” George said.
“Congressman,” Commander Duane said. “I’ll try to obey your order. But I think Mr. Poinsett is giving you good advice. I’ve only got ten men. A lot of people in that crowd have guns.”
Thomas Jefferson Glover wore a confident sneer on his fleshy face. He was daring George to tr
y to arrest him.
“Mr. George,” Hannibal said. “Let the man go. Let God punish him for what he done to my beautiful Tabitha. God will do it in his good time. We don’t need to depend on men.”
Beside Hannibal, Mercy was visibly terrified. She clutched the baby convulsively. The child emitted a feeble wail. “The poor chile, ain’t had nothin’ to eat since she been born,” she said.
George climbed up on a barrel and faced the crowd on the esplanade. “Mr. Poinsett has convinced me that this crime of murder will be prosecuted and, I hope, punished by the courts of South Carolina. In the meantime, I’m taking Tabitha Flowers’s dead body and her child back to Washington.”
“That kid belongs to me!” Thomas Jefferson Glover said. “I paid two hundred dollars for this wench. It ain’t my fault she died on board ship. This other wench is my property too. She’s worth five hundred dollars minimum.”
Joel Poinsett’s swarthy complexion grew almost pale. “Shut your stupid mouth,” he said.
“If there are any charges connected to this matter, send them to me, care of the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C.,” George said. “When this murderer is brought to trial, I want to hire the best lawyer in. Charleston to assist the state’s attorney.”
Commander Duane ordered five marines with fixed bayonets to precede them up the wharf to the street. Duane, Poinsett, George, Hannibal, carrying Tabitha’s body, and Mercy, carrying the baby, followed them. The other five marines brought up the rear. The crowd parted to let them pass through. No one spoke a hostile word. But there was no friendship on a single face.
In five minutes they were on board the Somers in the Navy Yard. Hannibal carried Tabitha into Duane’s cabin and the ship’s doctor examined her. He reported her body was covered with bruises and welts. She had been savagely beaten. As far as he could tell. she had died of a hemorrhage during childbirth. He also examined the baby and found it to be a healthy girl. But she was badly in need of nourishment.
The Wages of Fame Page 21