The Invisible Line
Page 8
The several dozen students at Yale from slave states tended to stick together and, in the opinion of a schoolmate from Massachusetts, “were slightly haughty in their bearing toward other less favored mortals.” They gathered to discuss politics and even examine opposing points of view in the privacy of their own society, the Calliopean, founded after a sectional squabble in 1819. Liberally furnished with spittoons, the society’s damask-draped chambers were lined with a ten-thousand-volume library. In 1851, amid fevered debates over the Fugitive Slave Act, the Southern students withdrew from every other club.14
Still, Randall Gibson was able to coast above the prejudices that Southern students faced. “I am sure he never gave himself the least trouble to overcome anybody’s prepossessions against him,” wrote a classmate. “It might not occur to him that there were prepossessions; it certainly would not occur to him that it was his business to remove them. He was quite free from anything like excessive regard for the opinion of others, and from morbid self-consciousness.” It did not matter that the Gibson family owned more than a hundred slaves on a sugar plantation southwest of New Orleans, not far from the scene of Uncle Tom’s martyrdom at the hands of Simon Legree. Defensiveness on the slavery question was beneath Randall. When his good friend Andrew Dickson White faced opposition for the editorship of the Yale Literary Magazine for his strident abolitionist views, Randall led the push to elect him. In his valedictory oration, Randall viewed himself and his fellow graduates as being the solution to the sectional crisis by virtue of their superior station. “When darkness and gloom gather and settle on the land,” he said, “when terror and dismay are depicted in every countenance, and the last resource of conciliation has been appealed to in vain; whither shall the fortunes of the republic turn for light, for hope, for guidance for preservation? . . . [I]t is to educated intellect that we are to look for the preservation of these American institutions.”15
Randall Gibson’s seemingly effortless aristocracy insulated him from suspicion and slight. While his fellow Southerners floundered, Gibson’s Yankee classmates could regard him as the quintessential plantation master without dismissing him as immoral, arrogant, and aloof. The secret to Gibson’s success was simple. While his manners “betokened ancestry,” his outlook and ambitions were decidedly more accessible to Northerners. Gibson was not at Yale to bide time before assuming an inheritance. His father wrote him dozens of letters that described sugar farming as a whipsaw of rising and plunging market prices, drought and flood. “Nothing but superior qualifications will enable a young man to succeed now a days,” wrote Tobias Gibson, urging his son to use his education to “rise superior to the mass of those who are content to live and to die as their Fathers did.” Randall’s father instructed him to economize and keep meticulous records, learn French so that he could succeed in business in Louisiana, and “get and study a little book called ‘The Pleasant Art of Money Catching.’”16
Randall absorbed his father’s advice. “I know full well the necessity of fitting myself for the world and I have no hope except in connection with action,” the young man wrote. He was resolved to pursue studies that would not “make a young man appear brilliant or interesting in the drawing room” but rather would “strengthen the powers of the mind when developed by rigid training, preparing it not only for reading but digesting, for tracing effects to causes, for judging as well as hearing.” Randall looked like an aristocrat, but he thought like a Yankee. His classmates could admire him as their hero because they could talk with him as equals.17
Randall Gibson’s mix of ancient and modern sensibilities—ancestry and ambition—was embodied in his family history. His mother’s line, the Harts and Prestons, was Kentucky royalty, founding families who had moved from Virginia during the Revolution and lived on vast bluegrass estates between Lexington and Frankfort, near the aptly named town of Versailles. Their relations were senators and governors. Randall’s mother, Louisiana Hart Gibson, was named in honor of the Louisiana Purchase by her cousin John Breckinridge, who had represented Kentucky in the Senate and served as attorney general under Thomas Jefferson.18
But the Gibsons were not pure products of the elite. Randall and Hart’s father, for one, had a decidedly new spirit. Born in Mississippi, Tobias Gibson made his fortune in the “white gold rush” of sugarcane farming that swept Louisiana in the 1820s and 1830s. Seizing the opportunity presented by favorable tariffs and new sugarcane hybrids, he borrowed heavily to buy dozens of slaves and hundreds of acres of land of “unsurpassed fertility” southwest of New Orleans. Over two decades of intense labor transformed a densely forested wilderness of “alligators[,] musquitoes, snakes [and] frogs” into “large cultivated fields and rich pastures, and improvements, which display taste and energy and wealth, . . . so sudden and yet so substantial.” Dividing his time between Louisiana and Kentucky, Tobias built a proud home in the center of Lexington that became a gathering place for supporters of the Whig senator Henry Clay. As befitted Tobias’s two lives, the house looked from the front like a Kentucky gentleman’s colonnaded manse, but behind the façade it was built around a courtyard in the New Orleans style.19
Throughout the Gibson children’s youth, the family would periodically steam down the Mississippi River from Louisville to New Orleans, and then take a boat and carriage to Bayou Black near the town of Tigerville, the site of Tobias Gibson’s plantation, Live Oak. The Gibson children were educated at Live Oak by private tutors and spent their days mostly outdoors, shooting, riding, fishing, and swimming. But life on the plantation was not entirely an idyll. Tobias invested in the latest technologies, “all the modern improvements of railroads, &c., for expediting the work of sugar making.” In the plantation’s steam-powered sugar house, the sugarcane was crushed and its juice extracted and evaporated in a violent, recognizably industrial process—in Tobias’s words, “the fires of pandemonium were kindled sure enough.” The smokestacks of New Haven were hardly the first that Randall and Hart Gibson had encountered .20
Even as Southerners were insisting that blacks were biologically inferior and unfit for freedom, Tobias Gibson had a slave working as his overseer and complained, “I am in conscience opposed to slavery—I don’t like it, and the older I get the worse it seems—& to entail it upon my children is not very agreeable to think of.” Such sentiment provided an easy way for one of the biggest slaveowners in Louisiana to feel virtuous about his way of life—disliking slavery made him a better master. Regardless, his willingness to express distaste for an increasingly inviolable institution was in keeping with his forward-looking character: entrepreneurial, politically savvy, unafraid of technology, pragmatic—a latter-day pioneer.21
Tobias Gibson’s parents and grandparents had also embraced transformation and the promise of the new. The Gibson family had settled in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1781 and then moved north toward Vicksburg. Randall Gibson never knew the man he had been named for. His father’s father had been an early convert to Methodism during the “awakening” of evangelical Christianity that had swept the western territories after the Revolution, and he had ministered to a small congregation that included two slaves. “Brother Gibson” frequently wept while “pouring out the pious breathings of his soul into the ear of God alone.” “Many were turned from darkness to light by his ministry,” said his eulogist.22
In the “Gibson Community” below Vicksburg in Warren County, Mississippi, the family was by and large wealthy and respectable but not above disputing with their neighbors over land and slaves and honor. The Mississippi Gibsons developed a keen sense of tradition—they practiced their penmanship by copying births and deaths out of an old Bible, learning the family tree like a catechism—but the family tree did not extend back past the initial settlement in Mississippi. They handed down a legend about “four Gibson youths” who had sailed for Virginia from England sometime in the seventeenth century, the children of the “younger son of an English lord” and “a Gypsy maid”—which explained the dark features that r
an in the family. They knew little about the Gibsons who shortly after the Revolution had moved from the banks of the Great Pee Dee River in the South Carolina backcountry to Mississippi. It was no matter that the Gibson family, most notably represented by Gideon Gibson the Regulator, had hovered on the line between white and black. Within a generation or two, the Gibsons would not think twice about their race. They had become unself-consciously white. Once they reached Mississippi, they were simply pioneers. In Kentucky and Louisiana they were prosperous planters. At Yale, Randall and Hart Gibson would be kings.23
Spring 1855
HART GIBSON WALKED past Yale’s Brick Row with an air of satisfaction. In March 1855 the weather was crisp and the elms still bare, but the new light of spring promised lovely days ahead. The New Haven winter—the interminable misty rain that insinuated itself into one’s bones, not to mention clothes, bedsheets, paper, and tobacco—was already fading into a damp memory. Gibson was confident that the illness and indisposition that had plagued him in the cold months were behind him at last. Soon it would be spring vacation, followed by examinations covering the past two years of courses, and finally graduation.24
The Yale senior was making plans to attend the law school at Harvard in the fall. The previous year his fortune had been secured when an uncle named him heir to a Kentucky estate called Hartland. Before he left Yale, however, he had some “hard study” to do during the spring break and would have to ask his father for some extra money. For someone as studious and popular as Gibson, it would be best to leave the city. “New Haven is the worst of all places to study during a vacation,” he wrote. “Enough students always remain in town to make idleness agreeable and in a measure necessary when study is not compulsory. Flight is therefore the only alternative if one wishes to accomplish anything.”25
Gibson was ending his days at Yale well. Although his older brother noted that Hart’s Yale career had been less brilliant than his own, Hart had won prizes for debate and declamation and in February 1855 was elected president of the college’s large and venerable literary society, Linonia. In his final term Hart could look back on an impressive ascent for someone who started school as a nonentity. “There probably was not a man so little known in our Freshman years or better liked as Seniors,” remembered a classmate, “or, when we parted, whose hand was grasped more closely.”26
During Gibson’s years at Yale, life for Southern students had become steadily more contentious. The divide over slavery sharpened and became personal, and Southerners had no place to hide after their Calliopean Society shuttered in 1853, more than a thousand dollars in debt to local booksellers. Many students from slave states bristled with insecurity, confirming everything their Yankee classmates supposed to be true about them. Gibson’s younger brother Claude, a freshman in the class of 1858, had already been cast in the part of the “hasty temper[ed]” and “violent defender of his native South,” worrying his family with “unfavorable accounts of [his] scholarship & extravagance.” Hart, by contrast, flourished in Yale’s everyday give-and-take—and not by blending in. He was proudly Southern, matter-of-factly proslavery. If he dressed anything like his cousin William Preston Johnston ’53, he “set the fashion” of his class, with splendid cravats, kid gloves, and smartly tailored coats. Hart impressed his classmates as a singular presence with a “peculiar dignity.” According to one friend from upstate New York, Hart cultivated a “self contained and self reliant reticence which checked too quick approach, but which, once overcome, held friendships fast.”27
Hart’s “self reliant reticence” hewed to the core of what had made his older brother Randall a leader at Yale. Two years out of college, now reading law at the University of Louisiana at New Orleans, Randall wrote letters to Hart that subtly and not so subtly reinforced the importance of keeping one’s ambitions at a higher level than mere social standing at Yale. Randall urged Hart to study law at Yale and Harvard and spend time in Europe. “Don’t think as much as we used to about settling in one particular place,” Randall opined. “Never think for an instant of marrying in the North,” he continued. “I have looked into this matter thoroughly. You can do better here blindfolded than in the North with your eyes open.” Above all, Randall wrote, “I would never let others know me as well as I know myself.”28
While Hart set himself apart as different, he thrived in New England’s cultural ferment, responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to “affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.” Unlike his fellow Southerners, Hart showed a willingness to criticize the South, a rare candor that intrigued his Northern classmates. “While our Yankee brethren are unable to rival us in statesmanship and popular oratory,” he wrote, “we are far, too far, behind them in polite literature and science.” When it came to issues of culture and education in the South, Hart tended to express himself like a New England reformer. “Our failure lies in the fact that we have no complete and permanently established system of universal popular education,” he wrote, “and the consequence is that knowledge which should be as free as the air we breathe, is conditional upon wealth and is thus placed beyond the reach of the greater part of our people.”29
Hart’s goal—of a culturally enlightened South that could “contend” with the North for “supremacy in History, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, and the sciences”—was naïvely romantic. Yet he couched his idealism in terms that echoed modern notions of capitalism, the spirit that was making New Haven a rich and powerful city. “Much stress is laid in Political Economy on the law of ‘supply & demand,’ ” he wrote his father. “It will be found I think that this principle operates with perhaps more force and universality in the intellectual than physical world.” As he imagined it, public education in the South would create a “permanent demand” that would allow literature to be “pursued and cultivated successfully as a profession.” Culture, in Hart’s mind, was a commodity to be bought and sold, fostering a regional economy staffed by teachers and professors and sustained by their expertise. It was a vision that more closely resembled New Haven than New Orleans. Whether he was being grandiose or practical, Hart spoke a language that connected with his Northern classmates.30
Just beneath the surface of Hart’s undergraduate idealism was an appetite for success in the real world. For much of his senior year, he had been attending a series of private lectures by his metaphysics professor on continuing one’s education after graduation. It was a subject, Hart wrote, “of vast practical importance to myself, as well as to those who go before and those who are to come after me.” The professor urged a course of miscellaneous reading, followed by “the acquisition of Modern languages,” training in a profession, and finally travel abroad. The goal was “to make an accomplished scholar and gentleman.” But Hart was left dissatisfied— what he really wanted were lectures that would “enable one to get the upper hand of the bustling activities of our progressive & expanding Republic.” Just what he meant by getting the “upper hand” was suggested in an 1854 letter by his older brother Randall, who was traveling at the time down the East Coast. “Washington of all cities attracted my attention,” Randall wrote Hart. “There are several very handsome residences in Washington that would suit you very well, but the White House in particular I would recommend.”31
ON MARCH 21, 1855, Hart Gibson dressed with special excitement for an evening in town. Throughout the winter he had cheerfully attended the “People’s Course of Lectures” organized by the New Haven Lyceum, a civic group dedicated to adult education. Even though the talks had been designed “chiefly with a view to aid the anti-slavery agitation,” Gibson delighted in the opportunity to see up close some of the great enemies of the South. John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, the first of the new breed of antislavery senators who were roiling the floor debates in the Capitol, did not just talk of abolition—he had served as lawyer for fugitive slaves and vigilantes who had interfered with their recapture. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker railed against the pervasive and
corrupting governmental influence of the “Slave Power” and urged Northerners to “annihilate” the “monster” of slavery. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, was a consummate showman who had been raising thousands of dollars to free individual slaves by holding “auctions” that shocked and thrilled his New York congregation. Perhaps most dangerous of all was Cassius Marcellus Clay, a Kentuckian from Gibson’s social circle who had been converted to abolitionism as a Yale undergraduate after hearing William Lloyd Garrison speak. Clay proudly remembered being described as someone with a “white skin” but “a very black heart.”32
While many Southerners responded violently to these abolitionist firebrands—during an 1848 congressional debate, Senator Henry Foote invited Hale to “visit the good state of Mississippi” so that he could “grace one of the tallest trees of the forest, with a rope around his neck . . . [I]f necessary I should myself assist in the operation”—Hart Gibson did not seem remotely threatened. With a light touch he wrote his father that the lectures had been “very edifying and instructive.” Just as casually, he refused to be swayed by them. “I need scarcely mention the burden of their song,” he said.33
On the night of March 21, however, the Lyceum was finally sponsoring a public lecture giving “a ‘South Side’ view of slavery.” The speaker was an introverted, self-taught country lawyer who had never traveled to the North before—indeed, he rarely left his home in the Virginia Tidewater region. Yet George Fitzhugh would be denounced by William Lloyd Garrison in the pages of the Liberator as “the Don Quixote of Slavedom—only still more demented.” In his physical and intellectual isolation, George Fitzhugh had become a proslavery pamphleteer, cultivating like hothouse flowers original ideas that took root across the South and changed the way people thought about slavery.34