The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  At age twelve, Bob Gadsby, as he was then called, was probably already noticeably handsome, with what were said to be alert, dark eyes topped by a broad forehead. He ventured out a rear door of the National Hotel, where he lived with his mother and her many other children in Washington, D.C. Considered the nation’s capital’s preeminent inn, Gadsby’s, as it was known in deference to its locally famous English owner John Gadsby, was a five-story limestone-and-brick structure that shouldered Pennsylvania Avenue for nearly a block and stretched even further up Sixth Street. Congressmen, military officers, foreign ministers, and other dignitaries arrived nonstop at its elegant portico to take up temporary residence, enjoy drinks in its saloon, or join the celebrations in its ballrooms while in town. In its lobby, cigar-chomping men assigned to curry favor in support of their patrons’ government interests would buttonhole the powerful men who passed by.

  As Bob hurried up the sidewalk, he likely prided himself on the natty, brocaded hotel-staff uniform he wore. He walked with a youngster’s quickstep from the National up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, making sure to step aside and tip his hat to other pedestrians. Reaching the Capitol, he leaped up the broad marble staircase until slowed by the great East Portico doors to the Temple of the Republic.

  Once beneath the soaring rotunda, he would have slowed his pace, while he crossed the stone-and-tile floor to the Senate chamber doors.

  There, he encountered a Senate page, Isaac Bassett, who, at age thirteen, was just a year older than the boy who stood before him. The younger boy asked the older if he might see Senator Daniel Webster, who was at his desk inside the chamber.

  Isaac’s reaction to Bob’s sudden presence went unrecorded, but surely the teenage page boy, who had the powerful senator from Massachusetts to thank for his post, was shocked at the young man’s temerity. Nobody approached the senator without some trepidation. Webster would have it no other way. The fifty-year-old statesman could appear frighteningly austere and imperious. He looked like the Puritans of old from whom he was descended, able to pierce a man’s heart with his very eyes and ready to smite all sinners who dared cross his path. He redoubled his priestly aura by always dressing in a black suit. Tall and black-haired, with a narrow raptor’s beak of a nose, he looked down on those around him, figuratively and literally, with dark eyes that burned “almost superhuman,” Bassett later recounted, from under his “precipice of brows.” If his appearance was not enough to intimidate his senatorial peers, let alone the boys, his “majestic” voice surely would be. It resounded from his monstrous chest with a force that shook even “the earth underground.” He used his basso profundo to turn his famously forceful eloquence to its greatest effect on the Senate floor—and in his frequent rages. Little wonder that his legions of admirers called him “the Godlike Daniel.” People who reviled him, numbering nearly as many, spoke rather of “Black Dan.”

  But what had to make Isaac’s eyes open wide was that the boy who came knocking on the Senate chamber doors mustered the courage to ask to see “his father.” According to a later description, Bob’s resemblance to the handsome Webster was “striking,” but Bob was black, and not figuratively like Senator Webster. Though light-colored, young Gadsby was a slave at the National, where he lived and worked with his mother and siblings, who were among the thirty-nine bondsmen owned by the glad-handing innkeeper, barkeep, and sometime slave trader.

  AFTER THIS VISIT, Bob almost certainly never mentioned his paternal origins again outside the most limited company until decades later. He had good reason to keep quiet about the matter. If the boy’s paternity claim were true, the slave was walking proof of a crime—interbreeding of the races—a serious legal matter even in the senator’s abolition-minded home state. It was also a moral abomination in the eyes of nearly all Americans. Any public declaration of the existence of Senator Webster’s black son would surely have destroyed his career. His self-proclaimed son faced a more serious danger. If he dared to make such a scandalous claim in public again, he would in all probability face a grave threat to his life or at least his station in life.

  Whatever danger Bob ran, the slave boy braved the senator’s “black look” to spend time with him that day. And Webster did not rebuff the boy at the Senate Chamber door. He must in fact have welcomed the presumptuous lad, for after Bob’s first visit, Bassett, who soon became Senate doorkeeper, would often bump into him when he “freekently came up to the Senate Chamber to see Senator Webster.”

  THE GODLIKE DANIEL WEBSTER was a colossus of the nation, exalted Concord, Massachusetts’s transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “the representation of the American Continent.” For Emerson, here in the flesh was “the completest man. Nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon, cut out such a masterpiece.” What captured Emerson and the nation were his sometimes flowery, always spellbinding speeches. The “Demosthenes of America” swept away his audiences, often speaking hours at a time. Emerson, one of the age’s most popular orators himself, credited Webster with raising the nation’s political discourse “out of rant and out of declamation to history and good sense.” Webster’s famous defense of the national union in his reply to Senator Robert Young Hayne during congressional debate over the nullification principle two years earlier—when he declared the national government to be “made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people”—would echo even more famously as his words were picked up down the years. Abraham Lincoln studied his reply to Hayne and called it “the grandest specimen of American oratory.” Webster would run for president three times, three times failing. He also served as secretary of state and, as the age’s leading Constitutional attorney, argued many influential cases before the Supreme Court.

  Revered by so many in the young republic, the Godlike Daniel was nonetheless a dark pearl. Beneath that lustrous black surface hid a hollow—some would call it rotten—core. Few who spent time with him away from public view could deny the man’s disturbing personal failings. But few outside his Washington circle knew anything of them. Even though newspapers of the day stood almost as one in never publishing stories about Black Dan, hot-breathed rumors engulfed him like the Foggy Bottom humidity. There was no doubt about Webster’s insatiable appetite for money and his persistent, accompanying indebtedness—and willingness to take loans he never intended to repay from many who could call upon him for Capitol Hill favors. Widely known, too, was his heavy drinking, which would damage his liver and contribute to his death.

  As a bachelor following his first wife’s death, then after his remarriage when alone, he welcomed women, high born and low, into his Washington chambers. His lack of sexual restraint was infamous in the nation’s capital. James Henry Hammond, a fire-eating South Carolina congressman, governor, and U.S. senator, lamented in a diary entry of December 9, 1846, his own ungovernable adulterous and even incestuous desires, including “more than two years continuously” in which his sister’s four daughters, ages thirteen to eighteen, “permit [ed] my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them.” He sought to excuse his lecherous ways, though, by noting that throughout history powerful men have succumbed to sexual temptation. In the same entry, he wrote that in “our present day and nation the very greatest men that have lived have been addicted to loose indulgences with women. . . . Among us now Webster . . . [is] notorious for it.” Prominent New York attorney and diarist George Templeton Strong more temperately described Webster as “slightly heathenish in private life.”

  Rumors of womanizing—and interracial couplings—accompanied him his whole career. But not for almost another twenty years after the “colored boy” came to see “his father” would a muckraking female journalist, Jane Grey Swisshelm, seek to pin down Black Dan with the scurrilous charge that he kept “colored women” as mistresses and had fathered numerous mixed-race children. Swisshelm, the first woman to report from the Senate Press Gallery, had her reasons for using her pen to take down one of the most powerful men in Ame
rica. She held staunchly abolitionist views. Like many in her political wing, she was outraged by Webster’s turncoat support for the Compromise of 1850, which balanced slaveholding and nonslaveholding territories and included the Fugitive Slave Law, which forced Northerners to turn escaped slaves in to the authorities for return to their owners or face criminal prosecution. To the compromising Webster, this suspended the Union’s rush to civil war—and he hoped raised his chances for the presidency. For the law’s opponents, his compromise with what they viewed as an unmitigated evil was at one with the taint governing the rest of his life. A frequent contributor to Horace Greeley’s leading New York Tribune, Swisshelm caught a “moral stench” arising from Webster’s reputation and hoped to identify its source and bring him down.

  She reported, “His mistresses are generally, if not always, colored women—some of them big black wenches as ugly and vulgar as himself.” She asserted that he had fathered “a family of eight mulattoes” living in Washington and “bearing the image and superscription of the great New England statesman, who paid the rent and grocery bills of their mother as regularly as he did those of his wife.” Swisshelm lost her Tribune job for publishing the stories.

  In fact, Webster’s own career would falter badly due to his support for the Compromise. Though Webster’s colleagues later falsely accused Swisshelm of having “killed” him—he died two years later—the accusation regarding “colored women” did not stick. But growing up, Bob always knew who his real father was.

  IT IS POSSIBLE THAT Webster urged Bob’s owner to sell Bob away from the nation’s capital to squelch just such rumors. That is not known. Bob would later recount that his mother, Charlotte Goodbrick, was “a mulatto of rare beauty,” purchased by John Gadsby, owner of the National, from a Fredericksburg, Virginia, man. Webster eventually bought Charlotte from John Gadsby to serve in his own household. Before his death, the senator granted freedom to her along with the rest of his slaves.

  Bob was not so fortunate.

  John Gadsby was one of the wealthiest men in Washington and, though described by the French minister to the United States as “an old wretch who made a fortune in the slave trade,” also among its most sociable. He and his third wife lived in what may have been the city’s stateliest and best-situated private home, Decatur House, built originally by the naval war hero Stephen Decatur on Lafayette Square behind the White House. Washington society flocked there to attend the couple’s frequent parties. Their house and the large adjoining slave quarters added to it by Gadsby stood across the street from Daniel Webster’s own residence. Gadsby’s seventeen house slaves likely trafficked back and forth between there and the National.

  During his time at the National, Bob mastered cooking, barbering, and a few other trades. He may even have cut the bright red hair of a jumpy sixteen-year-old who, in 1836, stopped at Gadsby’s for a night at the start of his first visit to Washington, D.C., while traveling from his home in Ohio to take up his appointment at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. William Tecumseh Sherman would return to town frequently in later years. He went from the National Hotel to the boardinghouse where his foster father, Ohio senator Thomas Ewing, resided.

  At the National, Bob probably also learned to win the hotel clientele’s trust, developing qualities that enabled him to move around comfortably within an alien and often hostile white society. Gadsby thought enough of Bob’s abilities that he gave the valuable bondsman, then about age twenty, to his son William for his personal use. That wouldn’t last long. The “rash, hot headed” William Gadsby didn’t have his father’s gifts for turning his sociability to profit. Instead, he drank and gambled heavily. Losing badly in a high-stakes card game in Richmond, William doubled down, betting his manservant Bob against another player’s $1,500 in gold. Bob was soon on his way into a new and strange life.

  THE GAMBLER WHO WON this human betting pot needed money more than slaves, for shortly after winning him, he sold Bob off. This passage took Webster’s urbane slave son deep into the Lower South and the heart of the South Carolina cotton Black Belt, where he was quickly sold again. In 1840, the powerful and wealthy planter Robert Cunningham bought him for his Rosemont Plantation, a thriving 2,100-acre estate outside the Upstate South Carolina town of Greenville, in the original Abbeville District, not far from the Calhoun Settlement. Bob became the latest addition to Cunningham’s holdings of well over 100 bondsmen—peaking at more than 150 slaves at one point. For someone like Bob, who had grown up in the midst of the capital city’s hubbub, life on an Upstate plantation, with its cotton fields stretching to the horizon and long rows of creaky slave cabins, must have felt like a descent into a dangerously self-enclosed and turgid land. Nonetheless, he managed to thrive.

  FOR THE NEXT SIX YEARS, he likely lived on Rosemont Plantation as Cunningham’s son John’s personal servant. That led to the next fateful step in his life’s journey. John was first cousin to, and close friends with, Benjamin Cudworth Yancey Jr., the occasionally hotheaded son of another prominent South Carolina landowner and legislator. Ben’s first years of life were spent on a plantation near Rosemont, but after his father’s early death and his mother’s remarriage to a Northern minister, he went to Upstate New York for prep school and then Yale Law School. When he returned to Greenville, he practiced law and helped his uncle with the management of Rosemont. There, he and his cousin’s slave, who was close to him in age and probably enjoyed sharing tales with him about life outside the South, developed a mutual respect and what amounted to a loyalty, if not a friendship, that would endure. Each would come to the other’s aid in times of dire need.

  Shortly after the Second Creek War, the lure of the newly available western lands drew Ben and his even more impulsive and violent brother, William Lowndes Yancey, to try to raise their fortunes in Alabama. There Ben acquired a large estate along the Coosa River. He soon added to his landholdings and began moving among large Alabama; Athens, Georgia; and Greenville properties. Together with his brother W. L., he launched and edited an Alabama newspaper. Both brothers acquired numerous slaves. As their personal fortunes grew, they also followed their late father in entering the thicket of Southern politics and ended up strong supporters of the Calhoun faction of the Democratic Party. Ben was elected to the South Carolina legislature for several terms and also to the Alabama state senate, where he served as its president for a term.

  W. L. in particular became an ardent states’ rights advocate, emerging as one of the South’s most vocal and fiercest fire-eaters. He openly declared himself ready to go to war in defense of Southern slaveholders’ rights. He won a seat from Alabama to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was closely allied with the most radical of the Calhounite faction. He drafted what was known as the Alabama Platform calling for radical resistance to what were viewed as the antislavery portions of the Compromise of 1850. When he spoke his political mind, he made sure his words stung, and following his very first speech in Congress, a personally affronted Whig representative, Thomas Clingman, challenged him to a duel. Neither man was injured in the exchange of pistol fire. Both avoided criminal charges and congressional censure.

  ALTHOUGH WILLIAM WROTE OF his beloved younger brother Ben, he “is said to be a little more staid in temperament than I am, tho I think a chip of [sic] the old block!” Ben was less intent on battling for Southern and personal honor than on getting rich. His Greenville and Alabama law practices thrived, as did his cotton plantations and other investments. In 1846, the Cunninghams’ twenty-six-year-old slave Bob, now married, asked Yancey to purchase him together with his wife. Yancey hesitated. He had scores of slaves already, nearly eighty on his Alabama plantation alone, but he appreciated Bob’s many talents, describing him as “a very intelligent and accomplished house servant.” He noted his skill in the kitchen with meats and pastries, as well as his “fine” way with preserves and pickling, and that he was “a good barber.” He finally consented to buy the costly slave couple he didn’t really need—on one c
ondition. Evidently, Bob had contracted William Gadsby’s fondness for gambling, or he turned to games of chance for easy money. He had a good mind for numbers and probably won more hands than he lost. Yancey would agree to buy the slave couple only if Bob would give up his “card playing.” Bob accepted.

  Yancey quickly came to think even more highly of his new servant, who proved, according to his fifth owner, “truthful, sober, affectionate, honest. . . . He was a faithful servant, much attached to me, my wife and children.” Yancey’s confidence in Bob grew to the point where he gave him a position of authority within his large, oft-moving household, having Bob “training up under him several young favorite negroes.” Guests were frequent and the demands of the family lifestyle complex. Yancey testified, “I would have trusted him with anything.”

  Bob responded well to the faith his owner placed in him, but the mutual respect between master and slave could not mask the reality of their relationship. Yancey may have felt a paternalistic fondness toward Bob, but he viewed his slaves and their families with little more concern than he did any other costly, productively useful property he owned. There’s no evidence that Yancey or his overseer physically mistreated slaves, but chattel was chattel. When one of his brother’s bondsmen grew “sullen and rebellious,” William told Ben, “I shipped him without a minute’s warning to New Orleans to be sold.” No doubt Ben would have done the same.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE COMPROMISE

  JAMES CALHOUN’S NEW-WON stature as a result of his valor and heroic leadership in the Creek War during the summer of 1836 helped launch a political career. The following summer, he received a virtually “unanimous” vote, sending him as Decatur’s representative to the state’s general assembly in Milledgeville, the current capital. He returned for two more terms; then, after a period focused on growing his legal practice, a state senate seat followed from DeKalb County and, later on, from Fulton County. In the brick Gothic Revival capitol halls and chambers, he proved adept at both backroom political maneuvering and public administration. A recognized authority on the intricacies of the state’s tangled, multitier legal system, his legislative work helped codify property rights. That enabled investors to acquire rights-of-way needed to plan the railroad lines that would open Georgia’s interior to development.