by John Jakes
The Hutchinsons sang five songs. A piano and cello accompanied them from the pit. Their last number was a stirring anthem, that concluded:
“Ho, the car emancipation
Rides majestic through the nation.
Bearing on its train the story—
Liberty, our nation’s glory!
Roll it along—roll it along
Through the nation
Freedom’s car—Emancipation!”
Men and women leaped to their feet, applauding. The enthusiastic audience held the Hutchinsons onstage and kept them bowing for more than three minutes. Virgilia’s cheeks looked bright and moist as she smiled up at the box again.
The first address, ten minutes, was delivered by another clergyman, this one from New York City. He explained and endorsed the anti-slavery position of the noted Unitarian divine, William Ellery Channing of Boston. According to Channing, slavery could best be overcome by a direct and continuing appeal to the Christian principles of the slave owners. It was a conclusion not unlike the one George had reached on the train. Tonight he put the theory alongside a mental portrait of Tillet Main and got a shock. He knew Channing’s plan would never work.
It wasn’t popular with the audience, either. The cleric sat down to just a spattering of applause.
The second speaker received a much bigger hand. He was a tall, grizzled black man introduced as Daniel Phelps, a former slave who had escaped across the Ohio River and now devoted himself to lecturing about his days of bondage in Kentucky. Phelps was an effective orator. His fourteen-minute address, whether true in every detail or not, wrung the last drop of emotion from the audience. His gruesome anecdotes of beatings and torture carried out by his owner brought men to their feet with howls of rage. When Phelps finished, he received a standing ovation.
Virgilia fidgeted with a handkerchief while the chairman introduced her. He put extra emphasis on her last name. Murmurs in the hall showed that some had recognized the name of the well-known family of ironmasters. One of the women in the box turned to give George a quick reappraisal. He felt better, less of a nonentity.
Virgilia continued to display nervousness as she walked to the podium. The poor girl really was too buxom, George thought; unattractive, almost. But perhaps some man would be taken with her intelligence. For her sake, he hoped so.
At first Virgilia spoke hesitantly, offering the audience nothing more than a standard denunciation of slavery. But four or five minutes into her address, the direction of it changed. The audience’s nervous foot shuffling stopped, and from the first row to the highest perch in the gallery, every eye was fixed on her.
“I am loath to speak of such things with members of the fair sex and small children present. But it has been said that truth is not and never can be impure. So we must not shrink from examining every facet of the South’s peculiar institution, no matter how distasteful—no matter how immoral.”
The hall was hushed. The audience sensed that Virgilia was skillfully blending wrath with titillation. The men and women in front of George strained forward to hear. He gazed out across the crowd, unsettled by the sight of so many sweaty faces bearing expressions of righteous zeal. What unsettled him most was his own sister. She gripped the sides of the podium and lost all her hesitancy, and even some of her coherence, as she went on:
“Whatever civility, whatever pretenses of refinement exist in the South—these are built upon a rotten foundation. A foundation which flouts the most fundamental laws of man and God. The South’s hateful system of free labor depends upon the perpetuation of its free labor force. And where do new laborers come from when older ones drop by the wayside, exhausted by cruel toil or killed by repressive discipline? The new laborers come from those very same plantations. For their true crop is a human crop.”
A shiver and a thrilled sigh swept through the hall as the audience realized what she meant. One woman rose in the gallery and dragged her small daughter toward the exit. Many around her scowled and hissed for silence.
“The plantations of the South are nothing less than black breeding farms. Gigantic bordellos, sanctioned, maintained, and perpetuated by a degenerate aristocracy which rides roughshod over the Christian beliefs of the few—the very few—Southern yeomen whose voices cry out in faint futile protest against these crazed satyrs—this godless immorality!”
Degenerate aristocrats? Crazed satyrs? Black breeding farms? George sat dry-mouthed, unable to believe what he was hearing. Virgilia tarred all Southerners with the same brush, but her accusations simply didn’t apply to the Mains. Not unless he was an imbecile and had been deliberately hoodwinked at Mont Royal. There were a great many evils in the peculiar institution, but he had seen no evidence of the one Virgilia described.
What horrified him most was the crowd’s reaction. They believed every word. They wanted to believe. Like a good actress, Virgilia sensed this eagerness flowing like a current across the footlight candles, and she responded to it. She glided out from behind the podium to let them see more of her. Let them see her righteous frenzy, her flaming glance and trembling hands, clenched white in wrath, which she brought to her breasts.
“The very stones cry out against such wickedness. Every upright human heart proclaims in moral outrage—no. No! No!” She flung her head back and struck her bosom each time she uttered the word. A man in the gallery picked up the chant. Soon the whole hall rang with it:
“No! No! NO! NO!”
Gradually the tumult subsided. Virgilia reached to the podium for support. Her breasts rose and fell. Patches of sweat showed on her clothing as she struggled to remember her place in the text. Short of breath, she rushed on to her conclusion, but George paid little attention to the words. He was appalled by her wild statements—and the crowd’s instantaneous acceptance of them.
Clearly his sister had found an outlet for long-submerged emotions. There was something indecent about watching her display them before hundreds of observers. Her language was sexual, her style almost orgiastic, as she proclaimed that morality demanded action against black breeding farms:
“They must be burned. Destroyed. Obliterated! And their owners with them!”
He jumped up and left the box, overturning his chair in his haste. He ran down flights of stairs, desperately eager for a breath of cold, pure air. As he reached the main floor, he sensed the auditorium walls shaking from the clapping and foot pounding that greeted the end of the speech. From the rear he looked inside.
The entire audience was on its feet. Onstage, Virgilia stood with her head thrown back. Her exertions had loosened her hair and disarrayed her clothing, but she was unconcerned. Her face shone with a dreamy exaltation, with fulfillment. He turned away, sickened.
Once outside, he gulped air and relished the falling snow. He would have to tell her she had spoken effectively, of course. But he also intended to take issue with her unfounded generalizations.
Her performance deeply offended him, not only on intellectual grounds but on personal ones. It was true that Virgilia was a grown woman in charge of her own life. Nevertheless, to see his sister or any other female display herself so shamelessly made him cringe. No matter what its veneer of propriety, her speech had been an outpouring of sexual passion. It had permitted her to say things no woman—no man, for that matter—would have dared to say in public in another context.
What dismayed him most was his feeling that Virgilia had reveled in the experience—and not solely for the moralistic reasons she proclaimed.
But even if he put aside the personal considerations, the shouts and halloos within the hall continued to upset him. They showed him a dimension of the slavery quarrel whose existence he had never before suspected. No matter how worthy Virgilia’s cause, she had somehow twisted it; an appeal for justice was transformed into a sordid, even frightening call for a savage holy war. There were warriors aplenty inside. He could still hear them howling for Southern blood.
On the train he had decided that all the sin lay on the S
outhern side, the side of the slave owners, and all the destructive pride as well. Tonight had taught him a fearful lesson. He was wrong.
In an hour he had changed his view of Northern abolitionists, for Virgilia had surely taken her cue from other members of the movement. How many of them were more interested in confrontation than in resolution of the problem? How many preached hate instead of common sense? He didn’t condone slavery or excuse the Mains because of what he had witnessed tonight. But for the first time he believed there might be some cause for the Mains’ resentment—just as they claimed.
Could the friendship of men from different regions, a camaraderie born in shared hardships, endure such terrible pressures? Was there enough good will in humankind and the nation to overcome the kind of mindless passions he had seen unleashed by his sister?
He shivered as wind-driven snow flew at him beneath the marquee of the auditorium. The storm was intensifying, hiding the nearby lights of the town. He began to perceive a future much grimmer than any he had heretofore imagined. He had a brief, dark vision of the country, hammered by the slave question until it shattered like brittle cast iron.
Difficult times surely lay ahead. Constance would help sustain him during those times, and he hoped his love would do the same for her. But as for the nation surviving the hammering—finding the flexibility and compassion necessary to resolve the issue—he just didn’t know about that.
Until this moment, he supposed, he had lived with illusion or ignorance. Now, huddled against the wall beneath the marquee and unable to light his cigar in the rising wind, he was staring at reality.
It terrified him.
A Lehigh Canal boat carried George on the last stage of his journey. The canal followed the course of the river through the valley, from Mauch Chunk down to Easton. The Grand Valley of the Lehigh had been home to four generations of Hazards. George’s great-grandfather had left a job at a forge in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, then the leading ironworking region of the colonies, to strike out on his own in Pennsylvania.
The valley had no huge natural deposits similar to the bog ore of Jersey. Nor was there as much flux as the Pine Barrens men took from nearby salt bays in the form of clay and oyster shells. But George’s great-grandfather did find great stands of timber for conversion to charcoal. He found water power. Most important of all, he found opportunity.
For years his was the only furnace on the river. Ore had to be brought over the mountains in leather bags carried by pack horses, but that didn’t deter him. The same transportation system had served furnaces in Jersey for a long time.
Competitors said he was crazy not to move to the Schuylkill River valley, but George’s great-grandfather paid no attention and persevered. In the valley of the Lehigh he was his own master, succeeding or failing solely on the basis of his own decisions.
During the Revolution the Hazards threw everything into the war effort and almost went to the wall financially. Luckily the rebels won, and the continuity of the line was not abruptly ended by a hang rope. But unqualified success continued to prove elusive.
Year after year the Hazards were forced to ship their iron down the river to the Delaware in antiquated Durham boats that were forever incurring damage on the rocks of the Lehigh rapids. Then, in 1829, the canal opened. A local man, Josiah White, had developed it principally to ship anthracite coal that had been discovered in the region. But the canal boats brought prosperity to almost every business in the valley, and Hazard Iron was no exception. For a century, products of the ironworks had provided the family with a steady if unremarkable income. Suddenly, thanks to the canal, many more markets were within reach, and in one generation, that of George’s father, the Hazards were rich.
George had grown up with the canal. The shouts of the boatmen and the occasional bray of a balky towpath mule were essential parts of his boyhood experience. Now men said the canal era was already passing. It had lasted scarcely thirty years, another dizzying proof of how fast the new, machine-driven world was changing. Evidently William Hazard had believed the predictions about canals. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone into the production of rails.
The boat stopped for half an hour at the expanding town of Bethlehem, which had been settled by members of the Moravian church from Bohemia. A few miles beyond Bethlehem, the skyline of the South Mountains began to take on a familiar aspect. It was a blustery, dark day. All the other passengers stayed below, but George stood on the roof promenade of the main cabin, reveling in the sights of home.
Under racing gray clouds, the low, rounded peaks looked almost black. The mountain laurel that covered them was dormant now. But in the spring, on all the hillsides, there would be pink and white flowers by the thousands. And the blooms would be found in every room of the Hazard house. George’s mother had a special, almost religious regard for the mountain laurel. She said the shrub was like the Hazard family. It often took root in rocky, unpromising ground, but it survived and thrived where other plants could not. She had transmitted that special feeling to George, much as his father had passed along his beliefs about the power of iron.
The canal boat proceeded around a long bend, gradually bringing into view the small town of Lehigh Station and, adjacent to it on the upstream side, the sprawl of Hazard Iron.
Nearest the river in the town stood several crowded blocks of poor cottages. This was the section inhabited by the growing population of Irishmen, Welshmen, and Hungarians who migrated up the river to fill the new jobs created by Hazard’s expanding product line. More and more cast iron was being used for construction in the large cities. There was a mania for cast-iron pillars and elaborate cast-iron cornices; even complete fronts of buildings were being manufactured. And of course Hazard’s now produced rails.
On the hillsides above the workers’ hovels rose the larger frame or brick residences of the town’s mercantile community, as well as homes belonging to foremen and supervisors at the ironworks. And highest of all, on a huge parcel of ground terraced out of the mountain, there stood the house in which George had been born.
He loved the house because it was home, but he despised its actual appearance. The first part of it had been built a hundred years ago; that section had long ago vanished within various remodelings, each of a different architectural period or style. The house had thirty or forty rooms, but it had no unity, no name, and in his opinion no character.
The dominant features of the Hazard Iron complex were the three furnaces, truncated cones of stone forty feet high. From the top of each, a wooden bridge crossed to the side of the mountain. Two of the furnaces were in operation. George could see the cumbersome movement of the bellows pumping in hot blasts of air and hear the noisy steam engines that powered the bellows. The furnaces spewed smoke, blackening the already murky sky. Charcoal was a dirty fuel and an outdated one.
On the bridge of the third furnace, workmen pushing handcarts crossed from the mountainside. They dumped the contents of the carts down the charging hole, then returned to the other end of the bridge for the next load. Surely some better method of moving ore, fuel, and flux could be devised. A system of steam-driven conveyors, maybe. His brother Stanley would probably want every other furnace in the state to install such a system before he would consider making it a permanent improvement.
The wrought-iron finery looked busy too. George had forgotten how big Hazard’s had become—especially with the addition of a good-sized building he hadn’t seen before. It adjoined the plate-rolling mill. It was the rail mill, he assumed.
Hazard Iron was a noisy, bustling, unclean operation. Its great slag heaps and charcoal piles disfigured the landscape. The smoke was an abomination, and the heat and din could be infernal. But it became more apparent each day that America was running and growing because of iron and the men who knew how to produce it. The business had gotten into the marrow of George’s bones, and it took this homecoming to make him realize it.
How would Constance take to it? Would she be happy here, marrie
d to an ironmaster and living in an unfamiliar place? He vowed to do everything possible to make her happy, but how she got along in Lehigh Station was not entirely up to him. That worried him.
He was glad that some business of the anti-slavery society had kept Virgilia in the city so that he could come home alone and slip gradually into his old life, with all its joys. And its sorrows. His father was gone. He felt guilty because, for a little while, overwhelmed by familiar sights, he had actually forgotten his father. He needed to make amends, and say good-bye.
A spectacular sunset lit the marble obelisk with the words William Hazard carved in its base. George uncovered his eyes, gave a last adjustment to the black wreath he had laid, and rose.
He dusted his knees as his mother approached. She had come with him to the graveyard in the hard, bright light of the winter afternoon. But she had remained several yards away while he silently said his farewell.
They walked down a precipitous path toward the waiting carriage. George had been home only a few hours, but Maude Hazard was already bubbling with plans for the wedding.
“It’s a tragedy your father couldn’t have lived long enough to meet Constance,” she said.
“Do you think he would have approved of her?”
Maude sighed, her breath pluming. “Probably not. But we’ll make her welcome. I promise.”
“Will Stanley make her welcome?” His tone expressed skepticism.
“George”—she faced him— “you already know that some will hate you for the step you’ve taken. The Irish are a despised lot, though I don’t quite understand why. You, however, are obviously very realistic, and I admire that. I admire you for your willingness to face up to the hate you may encounter.”
“I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, Mother. I love Constance.”
“I know, but there is still a great deal of un-Christian hate in the world. Love will somehow defeat it. It will and, if we’re all to survive, it must.”