Like an approaching train, the mob roared its way up the stairs. People slammed into the door, but Jennings and his men held fast, threatening to shoot anyone who crossed the threshold. Winsor told Price to crouch low and hold on to him around the waist. Together they inched toward the door.
For a moment the people on the third-floor landing found themselves at a stalemate. But then Winsor passed a note to them through the hole in the wall where the stovepipe had been. Someone looked through, saw that Jennings was within arm’s reach, and punched with all his might.
The blow through the hole in the wall blindsided Jennings. It staggered him, ruined his hat, and left him bloody. The rope slipped through his fingers, and the mob pushed the door open. In an instant Winsor and Price slipped out, and Jennings could only watch as his prize went “a paddlin’ down stairs over the heads of the crowd, as it seemed to me.”54
The current of outstretched arms carried John Price all the way into the Wellington town square. Outside in the cool dusk, the cart that O.S.B. Wall had taken from Oberlin was waiting. Simeon Bushnell covered Price with a blanket, snapped the reins, and headed north, first to Oberlin and eventually to Canada. In the hour that followed, hundreds of men who now called themselves the “Rescuers” traveled the same road, but at a decidedly more leisurely pace.
Wall rode home with Langston. Halfway to town they recognized a man galloping in toward them, shouting. It was John Mercer Langston. He had gone to Oberlin after finishing his business in Erie County, only to find the town virtually empty. Dashing south to Wellington, he passed Sim Bushnell and had the pleasure of congratulating John Price personally on his newfound liberty.55
All around them the road was filling up with their neighbors also heading back to Oberlin, singing and laughing and hollering, already telling and retelling their stories. With the Langston brothers at his side, Wall took his place in the victory parade.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CIVIL WAR
Wall, Gibson, and Spencer, 1859-63
Wall: Cleveland, 1859
THE MEN LOCKED ARMS as they marched down the broad hallway outside the courtroom. They were young and old, every shape, size, and color, all formally dressed, holding valises. O.S.B. Wall and Charles Langston took their places among them. Nodding to wives, well-wishers, and newspapermen lining the way, twenty defendants walked two by two into the April rain. It was not much warmer than the day, five months before, when they had been indicted. After a brief walk they stopped outside a shabby building with narrow arched windows and stone guard towers. While the U.S. marshal conferred with the sheriff over the terms of confinement, the men were slowly soaked through as they contemplated their new home, the Cuyahoga County Jail.1
Not an hour before, Simeon Bushnell, the Oberlin printer’s clerk, had been found guilty of “rescuing” “a certain negro slave called John” at Wellington, Ohio, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. It was a result that surprised no one. Every single juror had been a proslavery Democrat. After the judge announced that the same panel would try the remaining defendants, the men known as the Oberlin Rescuers declared in protest that they would no longer accept the terms of their bail. They preferred jail.2
Langston would face trial the next Monday, in three days’ time. He was already prepared for the worst, convinced that “the courts of this country, that the laws of this country, that the governmental machinery of this country, are so constituted as to oppress and outrage colored men.” Wall, by contrast, would soon be released to his family. Because the indictment had listed him as “Oliver S. B. Wall,” the judge regarded the document as a fatally flawed “misnomer,” and the federal prosecutor was preparing to drop all charges. Throughout his life Wall encountered few people who could spell Orindatus. His slave’s name would make him a free man.3
Wall had taken the witness stand at Simeon Bushnell’s trial, weighing in on a factual dispute. While the slave-catchers had testified that the man they kidnapped was a particular Kentucky runaway well known to them, Bushnell alleged that their captive did not match that runaway’s physical description—he had a different height, a different weight, and a different skin color. As a bootmaker accustomed to working with hides, Wall testified on the last issue, drolly cataloging the range of complexions of people of color.
With sly resolve, Wall insisted on such a degree of precision, so far beyond what most whites could imagine—from black to dark and light brown, to “dark, lighter and light mulatto” to “copper color, which is about the color of hemlock tanned sole leather”—that the courtroom erupted repeatedly in laughter. Unintimidated by lawyers or the judge or the majesty of the federal court, Wall was in complete control. Although a guilty verdict seemed preordained, Wall was able to gain some small victory for his people, crafting a performance that invited newspapers to comment that a black man had “show[n] more intelligence, by far, than the Kentucky negro catchers who preceded him.”4
The air in the jail was damp and hard to breathe, but the prisoners’ mood on Saturday and Sunday remained light, even celebratory. Among the Oberlin faithful, the months since their indictment the previous December had been occasions for toasts, militant speeches, and organized gatherings they proudly called Felons’ Feasts. Now that the Rescuers were behind bars, men, women, and children visited them from morning to night. Hours passed in discussion and debate, about the Slave Power and Slave Oligarchy, the right to a fair trial, the proper way to respond to the law when it violated God’s command. It was the Oberlin College education that Wall had never received. Hundreds joined prayer services in the courtyard, their hymns pushing at the stone walls.5
Among the visitors was a tall man with an unblinking stare, hunched into an unnatural posture. Although he had been assured that he would not face arrest, it was never easy for a wanted fugitive to enter a jail. John Brown, the scourge of slavers in Bleeding Kansas, had taken the trouble to tuck his beard into his shirt. He had been watching the trial ever since arriving in Cleveland from Canada. His journey south had not ended. He was looking for recruits for a new Provisional Army in order to raid the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, inspire thousands of slaves to revolution, and cleanse the nation’s sins with fire and blood. More than anyone in the jail, he understood that at some point the speeches would stop, and war would begin.6
That Sunday afternoon a local daguerrean gathered the Rescuers in the courtyard for a group portrait. Wall buttoned his waistcoat. As the men gathered, Bushnell and Langston took their places in the center. Wall moved to the edge of the group. Before their image was captured, the Rescuers took off their hats. One man placed his on the ground. Others held them in their hands. Wall looked to his left, stuck out his chest, and kept his top hat high on his head, like a soldier at attention. No one stood taller.7
Gibson: Columbus, Kentucky, December 1861
THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER WAS running low; even from the steamer’s deck, Randall Gibson had to look up at the banks. As the freezing wind punctured his uniform like canister shot, he could not help but feel exposed. He was outside his regiment’s fortified position on high ground, beyond the heavy chain that his general had ordered extended across the river to Missouri, to render an invisible border impregnable. The white flag that flew overhead was the only thing keeping Gibson alive. The twenty-five winding miles from Columbus, Kentucky, to Cairo, Illinois, were no less than the distance, in Gibson’s mind, between liberty and tyranny.8
As the boat steamed north, several officers on board—men from Nashville and Vicksburg and New Orleans, lawyers, planters, and merchants, sugar and cotton men, a fellow Yale alumnus—seemed to be enjoying the excursion. Gibson was not. When one of his colleagues informed him that their guest of honor had requested his presence, the twenty-nine-year-old colonel felt little desire to oblige him. Gibson walked inside to a stateroom, where a man was lying on his back. Henry Dougherty, also a colonel, was ashen from loss of blood; the remains of one of his legs still oozed from three botched amputations
. But he was pleased to be heading home and had asked to meet the man among his captors who had spent so many happy years in the North. Gibson could manage a few bare pleasantries and little more. “While I could not help but feel sympathy,” he wrote, “I could take no interest in conversation with him & retired quickly.”9
Even before Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Randall Gibson had doubted that the Union would survive and was urging the South to “prepare for every emergency.” To the young Louisianan, the conflict was less a question of states’ rights or of the propriety or necessity of slavery than about the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” The North, in his view, was committed to the radical dogma of “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men.” By contrast, “Southern society is based, its life and soul are staked, upon the inequality of the races, not only its aims, its expansion and progress, but its very existence.” If the North forced Southern whites to live as equals with the people they owned as slaves, then the South would have to enjoy “independence out of the Union.”10
After the election Gibson’s sister Sarah drafted a letter to Lincoln with signatures from the most respectable matrons of Lexington, Kentucky, urging him for the good of the country to resign before taking office. Randall, however, was past any hope of reconciliation, running as a secessionist in the election for delegates to a convention that would determine whether Louisiana remained in or left the Union. The crisis gave his life a purpose that he had not felt since graduating from Yale in 1853. After sitting through a year of law lectures at the University of Louisiana and passing the bar, Gibson sailed for Europe in 1855, traveling with his brother Hart to Paris, London, Heidelberg, St. Petersburg, Rome, and Madrid. Returning after two years, he tried to make a life for himself as a sugar planter. His crop flooded, and he found his neighbors distasteful. While Hart took possession of his vast Kentucky estate and married into one of the state’s richest families, Randall had had to sell his land. He started managing one of his father’s plantations and dreamed of a life in politics. It seemed impossible, though, for a young man to get elected to office. In the polling for the secession convention, Gibson placed third of four candidates.11
In February 1861, two months before Fort Sumter was bombarded and fighting began, Gibson enlisted in Louisiana’s army as a private. Hart was commissioned a captain in the Kentucky cavalry, Claude an artillery lieutenant. Of their other brothers, Preston became an army surgeon, and McKinley and Tobe, who had been traveling in Europe, made their way home and joined the army too.12
Randall was soon promoted to captain and in September was made colonel of the Thirteenth Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, ten companies totaling 830 men, mostly from New Orleans. Even though Gibson’s faith in the Confederacy was rooted in his desire to preserve the Southern racial order, his troops, according to an aide, were “as cosmopolitan a body of soldiers as there existed upon the face of God’s earth. There were Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Dagoes, Germans, Chinese, Irishmen, and, in fact, persons of every clime known to geographers or travellers of that day.” They wore “jaunty zouave uniform[s],” drilled in English and French, sang songs in their native languages, speculated on their regiment’s unlucky number, and lived a continuous “saturnalia” of gambling and drink. Gibson put ideology aside and focused on turning his recruits into soldiers. During the fall of 1861, as he worked with his officers in camp, Gibson did not subscribe to the gentlemanly romance of war—even though many in his regiment predicted a glorious Confederate victory before they had finished their training. Rather, like a Yale man, he devoted himself to the study of military tactics. Without any experience in war, he knew that the army’s true weakness was a lack of “military men by education,” “scientific officers,” and “West Pointers.” By November’s end, the regiment was leaving Louisiana for the war’s western front as a band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” They reached Kentucky on the last day in November, shrouded in snow and sleet. They camped on frozen ground and waited for the fight.13
When the steamer reached the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the Union battery at Fort Holt noted the boat’s white flag of truce and fired a shot across the bow. The steamer stopped and waited for another boat, flying an American flag, to approach. After the two were lashed together and turned upstream, the prisoner exchange began. The brigadier general in charge of the Union army at Cairo was short and stooped, his brown beard cascading in waves down to the brass buttons doublebreasting his coat. He greeted several rebel officers fondly, having known them from West Point and the Mexican War; a Confederate captain in the party was a kinsman. Officers on both sides shook hands and raised glasses. Although members of the brigadier’s staff predicted that they would soon be marching “on to New Orleans,” they assured their foes that they “came to save not to destroy.” The brigadier declared he would resign his commission “if war should be made against slavery”; he had owned a slave himself just a couple of years earlier in Missouri. Although he freed the man before moving to Illinois, his wife still owned four slaves and was leasing them out.14
The outpouring of good feeling unsettled Gibson. “To all appearances,” he wrote that week, “there had been a meeting of friends.” Just a month earlier the two sides had fought their first major engagement since the rebels occupied Columbus in September 1861. The rebel occupation had violated Kentucky’s neutrality, prompting the Union army to move into the commonwealth, and led the legislature to declare its allegiance to the United States. At the Battle of Belmont, more than eleven hundred men had been killed or wounded. In previous meetings to swap prisoners and bury the dead, Union and Confederate officers had recognized each other from the battlefield; they had all been within range of the other side’s rifles but had survived. Their very presence at these parleys seemed a testament to both sides’ mercy and good faith. Gibson and his men had arrived three weeks after the fight. Perhaps if the Thirteenth Louisiana had seen action, he would have felt more charitably toward his counterparts.15
As it was, Gibson nursed a quiet contempt for his foes throughout the prisoner exchange. “I was thoroughly disgusted with the whole party,” he reported. Although he had schoolmates from Maine to Delaware—many of whom were fighting for the Yankees—Gibson made a special effort to resist “any sociability of feeling that may have existed.” He refused to be a Southern gallant who treated the war as sport. His ability to kill for the Confederate cause compelled him to loathe the North. He thought the enemy officers were “impudent upstarts . . . [I]t was evident from the whole tenor of their remarks that their purpose individually was subjugation & confiscation.” The most Gibson would concede was that the Union army’s brigadier general, a man named Ulysses S. Grant, “had somewhat the appearance of a Gentleman.”16
A few days later, back in Columbus, the Confederate army received reports that the enemy was moving in force just across the river in Missouri, near the site of the battle four weeks earlier. That night Gibson’s regiment moved silently upriver and scouted till dawn through cornfields and woods, slowly making their way back to camp. For a moment they heard hoofbeats and assumed that the Yankee cavalry was upon them, but it was only a herd of horses running by. Whatever enemy troops had been there were long gone. Not a weapon was fired.17
As morning broke, the regiment moved through the old battlefield at Belmont. For months Gibson had wondered what war would be like. Since arriving in Kentucky, he had been living among officers who had led their men under fire, suffered through the slaughter, and recorded the messages of dying men. Now he saw what awaited him. When the day came, and it would not be long, the field of battle would not be glorious. “I counted as I marched along twelve dead horses and the trees & earth looked scorched & in places torn up,” he wrote his father. “It looks like it had been struck by constant streaks of lightning.”18
Spencer: Pain
tsville, Kentucky, January 1862
THE TENTS ON THE HILLSIDE struck newcomers as a “pretty queer” sight, a city where there should only have been a cabin or two. In firelight blurred by sleet and fog, the rows of pale canvas resembled stones in a mountain cemetery. For soldiers in the Fifth Kentucky Infantry, the resemblance did not end there. Hundreds without tents had hacked holes in the hard ground, filled them with leaves and dirt, and slept in them, sometimes huddled together for warmth.19
George Washington Spencer was just three miles below Paintsville and a short ride from his family, but he could not have been farther from home. On the Spencer farm he was the oldest of eight boys and girls and had labored many hard years under his father, Jordan. As his brothers got older, and as the farm became more productive, the work and his responsibilities only grew more intense. The war had some effect on the families along Rockhouse Creek. A few of the boys left to fight. Soldiers on both sides took food, and there were more strangers wandering through the hills. Irregular “home guards” of various stripes periodically attacked farms and businesses in Johnson County, but the raids were more like robberies than military actions—victims sued the bushwhackers for damages in the local court. Otherwise, life continued as it always had; every moment of the war, Malinda Spencer was either pregnant or nursing an infant.20
Now, instead of being the oldest son, George was among the youngest soldiers in his company, just fourteen or fifteen. He huddled around a fire with five other men. They shared their rations but were still hungry. In January 1862 George Spencer had been a rebel for a little more than two months. His decision to volunteer had hardly been a given. Kentucky was a divided state, and Johnson was a divided county, one of the few places where brother actually fought brother. Even after the commonwealth declared its allegiance to the Union, the county tried to maintain its neutrality. To keep the peace, the local court banned the flying of any flag, United States or Confederate, in a public place. Although the county had long voted by overwhelming margins for Democrats, most of its people remained loyal to the Union. With so few slaves, Johnson County had very little stake in the rebellion; some residents placed Uncle Tom’s Cabin next to their Bibles.21
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