The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  On May 15, 1871, the territorial assembly gathered in its new chambers at Metzerott Hall, on Pennsylvania Avenue midway between the Capitol and the White House. Once the site of plays, music recitals, and public séances, the hall was now home to a different kind of theater. As justice of the peace, Wall administered the oath of office to the legislators, ushering in a new era of District government. Following the ceremony, the officials stepped outside, where the territory’s fire department, militia, and many Republican clubs were pounding their way up Pennsylvania Avenue—now paved with wood planks—to the White House for President Grant’s review.36

  AFTER THAT INTERMINABLE WEEK in June 1871 when Wall lay dying, he did something remarkable: he lived. “Though he is still in a very critical condition and suffers much from his wound,” the New National Era reported, “hopes are entertained for his recovery.” Another week passed, bringing “high hopes of his recovery from effects of the assassin’s bullet.” In July, James Davenport was released on bail, “Wall’s recovery now being certain.” At summer’s end the shooting ceased to be news. “Wall is now recovered,” reported one paper with evident disappointment, “and the case loses the more tragical interest which attached to it while the life of the victim was in jeopardy.”37

  Wall rose from his deathbed to find the street outside his house unrecognizable. In the scorch of late summer, dozens of men were hacking away at Seventh Street with shovel and pick, widening the road threefold and leveling its steep rises to a grade gentle enough for a horse-railway all the way to Boss Shepherd’s estate near the Maryland line. Having excavated mud and rock from the roadbed, laborers erased Seventh Street’s notorious ravines, gulleys, and mantraps. In the middle of the road, tons of crushed stone were being slowly rolled and pounded into a foot-thick layer of macadam, while crews graveled the rest of the street and sidewalks. From the Boundary north, Seventh Street was becoming, in the project engineer’s words, “a first-class road, a leading, important thoroughfare.” Teams of horse carts trucked in tons of rock from a nearby quarry that happened to be owned by Joseph T. H. Hall, the area’s delegate in the territorial assembly.38

  The road crews were day laborers hired from the neighborhoods surrounding Wall’s house. Most were colored. Instead of organizing into unions, the crews belonged to local Republican Party clubs. Soon after Wall was back on his feet, his name started circulating as a possible challenger to Hall. The incumbent, Wall said, “was a lover of office; rather restless and fidgety about the matter.” One of the timekeepers on the Seventh Street project, a Howard University undergraduate named R. D. Ruffin, had spent the previous several years giving stump speeches in his home state of Virginia in favor of black candidates. Although Ruffin worked every day on Seventh Street, the job did not interfere with his passion for politics—“I had night-time for that,” he would remember. He soon decided to devote all his energy and “political influence” to Wall’s candidacy for the House of Delegates. For Ruffin, Wall’s election would mean that the Seventh Street project’s supervisors “would treat the colored laborers as the white laborers were treated, and . . . would treat the colored bosses as the white bosses were treated.”39

  At a meeting in early September, Ruffin spoke out against the incumbent and promptly lost his job. “I shall certainly try to take care of my friends,” Joseph Hall scolded Ruffin, “and not of those who are going to oppose me.” Two others—one white and one black, foremen in charge of gangs of thirty laborers—were similarly fired for being a “Wall man, and not a Hall man.”40

  Talk of a Wall candidacy rattled not only the incumbent but also the board of public works. Wall supported the board’s plans—he said that God Himself, “with His knowledge of the state of things in this old District, . . . was in favor of improving it.” But the incumbent was the board’s business partner in the street-paving effort. When Wall had an audience with Boss Shepherd to insist that Ruffin be rehired, Shepherd said that the timekeeper would be reinstated as soon as he “repented.” Ruffin refused.41

  Individual members of the board confronted Wall to tell him not to run. Wall was unbothered by what he described as a “little set-to.” “I don’t think any the less of a man who don’t think much of me,” he said. “If they knew as much of me as I do, I could not blame them for not voting for me.” The board bankrolled Hall’s campaign; Wall had no money, just “God and the people with us.” The District’s governor, Henry Cooke, met with Hall and Wall and suggested that one candidate drop out of the race before the election. As Wall recalled the governor’s position, “The only difference with me was, who should withdraw.” Every morning leading up to the election, Joseph Hall would walk among the laborers on Seventh Street, alternately offering them money for their votes and threatening to discharge them if they considered voting for Wall.42

  Campaigning at the Old Soldiers’ Home in the fall of 1871, Wall could look out over all of Washington. From the hilltops three miles above downtown, the city appeared serene, almost beautiful. Festooned by autumn foliage, Pennsylvania Avenue looked as if it had always been grand. The Washington Monument—stunted at quarter height for nearly two decades—seemed to kneel before the Potomac and the National Cemetery beyond. The Soldiers’ Home itself was at once a monastery and leper colony—a soothing retreat and a place where some wounds never healed. The main dormitory looked like a Norman abbey, and the large gabled cottage in its shadow had served multiple presidents as a summer residence. President Lincoln had found particular solace at the Soldiers’ Home during the worst of the rebellion, when the District faced constant threat of attack. Here he reputedly drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.43

  Wall had not come to the Soldiers’ Home to escape or disappear. He stood before its residents asking them to reengage with the world outside and vote for him for the District’s House of Delegates in the upcoming November election. Wall was darker than any of the old soldiers—they were all white. He claimed to be uncomfortable making political speeches. But he had complete confidence in his ability to represent the men he faced. Rather than discussing the dominant issue in the election—approval of a massive loan for the District’s streets and sewers—the candidate spoke plainly, giving them, in his words, “a little Wall-wise.” “I talked about their lives and their loyalty to the Government,” he later remembered, and said that he “thought they ought to be properly appreciated.” Just as the old soldiers were defined by their service, Wall viewed his commission as a singular distinction in his life. They had fought for the same cause. Wall was still fighting it, and now he bore the scars of battle.44

  ELECTION DAY DAWNED UNDER gray skies, a damp autumn wind seeping under people’s skin. At Fort Slocum, north of Howard University, eighty-two men gathered under the banner of their Republican club—seventy-five colored, seven white, all employed on the Seventh Street road. They had resolved the night before to assemble just after dawn and march together to the polls. They walked behind the club president, the timekeeper who had replaced Ruffin. Approaching the voting station, Hall’s men made a “grand rush” and tried to give them their candidate’s tickets. To a man, the Fort Slocum club refused. As their president described it, “They only asked for Wall tickets.” They lined up, eighty-two strong, and cast their ballots one by one. It was the exact margin of Wall’s victory.45

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SPENCER

  Jordan Gap, Johnson County, Kentucky, 1870s

  JORDAN SPENCER ARRANGED HIS hand and studied the other players. They were neither cardsharps nor tenderfoots, just a group of men who had known one another for years and enjoyed a regular game of poker out at the Jordan Gap. A game in the hills—cooled by the night breeze, calmed by a serene wash of stars—would have had little of the tension of a saloon or riverboat. Still, no one was out to get skinned.1

  Sam Estep owned a farm two miles away on Rockhouse Creek. Tom Baldwin, a blacksmith, had a daughter and grandchildren nearby on Barnett’s Creek. Two other players, John Preston and Hiram Stron
g, had come out from town. Preston ran a hotel on Main Street, where Jordan sometimes worked. Strong was Paintsville’s doctor. It was a collection of imposing personalities. Spencer was nearly sixty years old—most of his children had children of their own—but worked as if he were decades younger. Preston came from the county’s richest family. And Dr. Strong always made sure that people knew he was there; he had his boots specially crafted to squeak loudly at every step.2

  Spencer had lived at the Jordan Gap close to twenty-five years. He was now known in the hollows west of Paintsville as “Old Jordan” or “Old Jord”; to outside ears, it sounded more like “Jerd.” Despite his age, he still spent long days farming and timbering. If anything, the survival of eleven Spencer children—seven boys and four girls—to adulthood made the farm the most productive it would ever be. Jordan’s oldest were in their thirties and had children of their own. His youngest son, Jasper, was just entering his teens. As they grew, the boys tended the cornfields, hauled logs, and split fence rails. The girls weeded the garden, cooked and canned for the winter, made clothes, and handled the youngest boys and girls. Their aunt, Clarsy Centers, Malinda’s sister, had moved from Clay County to spend her last years with the Spencers. For Jordan, it made no sense to slow down and divide the farm. He was single-minded about getting the most out of his land and his labor force. “Spencer was a man who never sent his children to school,” remembered a neighbor. “He worked them pretty hard.”3

  The poker players got along, though they well remembered the time they were trying to kill one another. When the war broke out, Dr. Strong rode to his home state of Virginia and joined the Confederate cavalry as a surgeon, and Jordan Spencer’s oldest son, George, fought with the rebels in the Ragamuffin Regiment. On the other side, while Sam Estep lasted only a month in the Union army before being discharged, John Preston enlisted as an eighteen-year-old and survived nearly three years of grinding battle as a mounted infantry sergeant in the Kentucky and Virginia hills.4

  After the war Strong spent a couple of years in self-imposed exile out in Wyoming, but he returned to Paintsville unrepentant, casting a Democratic ballot in the first postwar congressional election even though his voting privileges had not yet been restored. There was peace, but people continued to disagree over politics and refused to forget years of killing and robbery and destruction at the hands of soldiers, irregulars, and criminal marauders. County residents filed more than two dozen lawsuits to recover wartime losses, and the courts ordered local defendants’ property sold to satisfy judgments. Paintsville Republicans split from the Southern Methodist Church and organized a Northern congregation two blocks away. For more than twenty years Paintsville’s two elementary schools were segregated by wartime allegiance—one for Confederates and Democrats, the other for Unionists and Republicans.5

  Despite the lingering division, people in Johnson County found ways to move forward. What had once been a unanimously Democratic county now voted two-to-one Republican, and at least some of the former rebels changed their allegiance to Lincoln’s party. Many of the local combatants were related to one another, and kinship ties fostered reconciliation. As a Union veteran, John Preston might have found it easier to sit down with a former Confederate because two of his older brothers had joined the rebel army. Veterans of both sides started gathering at Constantine Conley’s shoe shop in Paintsville; while Conley, a former Union soldier, awled, stitched, and lasted, the men put aside their differences and swapped stories. They could do the same at Jordan Spencer’s poker game.6

  The poker players looked at the cards they had been dealt. They went around the table in a slow circuit, betting or folding, discarding and drawing, raising the bet, and finally calling. In a game where, according to one nineteenth-century cardsman, “it is a great object to mystify your adversaries,” the moment when the men revealed their hands was a reminder that nothing was ever as it seemed. The fellow talking chaff might have little more than a high card, while the quiet man held nothing but spades.7

  To all appearances, everyday life in Johnson County, Kentucky, was no different from what it had been like a generation earlier. But something had shifted. The war had introduced many of Johnson County’s veterans to the world outside, and it had also brought outsiders in. Northern speculators and investors began contemplating the ancient hardwood forests and seemingly inexhaustible deposits of coal in the Kentucky mountains. In 1864 a local businessman took a steamboat to Pittsburgh to tell investors in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company about Johnson County springs that bubbled with petroleum. With interest rising in the potential uses of oil as medicine and fuel, speculators and wildcatters from the Pennsylvania oil fields started showing up in Paintsville, forming five stock companies in six months. Veterans tramping through the county on their way home from the war were amazed at the sight of oil derricks along Paint Creek. The way mountaineers thought about themselves, their land, and their place in the world was changing.8

  With each poker hand, the responsibility of shuffling and dealing would rotate from player to player. It was a practice that began on Mississippi steamboats as a way to eliminate the dealer’s advantage, to make it harder to mark cards and deal from the bottom of the deck. There was little such danger in the Jordan Gap, but the players followed the ritual. The dealer held a marker—a button or silver dollar or buckhorn knife, known as the “buck”—that denoted his position of authority. As soon as one hand was over, the buck would be passed to the next hand’s dealer.9

  When it was time to pass the buck to Jordan Spencer—when it was his turn to deal—Dr. Strong looked straight at him and said, “Buck, nigger!”10

  John Preston was jolted. He had heard Tom Baldwin say that Spencer had once been a slave and had bought his freedom, but Preston had never heard anyone speak so bluntly to Spencer’s face. Was Strong cracking a joke—say, punning on the word buck, a common slur for a black man? Or in a moment where whiskey was being drunk and money lost, did something more serious slip out of the doctor’s mouth?11

  Johnson County had been spared the wrenching transition from slavery to free labor because there were so few blacks to free. But more families had owned slaves in Kentucky than in any other border state. The state had remained in the Union, so it was not subject to the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after the South surrendered, there were more than 65,000 slaves in Kentucky, and the state legislature voted against ratifying the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which ultimately freed Kentucky’s slaves and guaranteed them equality and voting rights. As people of color organized and declared themselves, as the Kentucky Colored People’s Convention did in 1866, “part and parcel of the great American body politic,” Southern whites responded with violence but also with pointed assertions that blacks had no claim to equal rights because of an inferiority carried in the blood.12

  Immediately after the war, Kentucky’s legislature barred interracial marriage, limited the free movement of blacks, forbade their testimony against whites, punished blacks more harshly than whites for the same crimes, and segregated the schools by race. In 1867 the Kentucky Supreme Court declared that such measures were necessary to prevent circumstances that would be “deteriorating to the Caucasian blood.” All over the South the boundaries between black and white were shifting and hardening. Before the war slavery had established and supported white privilege. As long as law and violent custom preserved the boundary between master and chattel, privileged whites had had little real need to insist on racial purity; allowing ambiguous people to become white only strengthened the prevailing order. In slavery’s absence, however, preserving white privilege seemed to require new, less flexible rules about race and constant, aggressive action to enforce them.13

  Although Johnson County whites had no reason to organize lynch mobs, gangs of self-described “moderators” and “regulators” were beating, murdering, and otherwise terrorizing blacks across rural Kentucky. In nearby Tennessee the legislature took the logic of racial purit
y one step further, defining Negro to include all people “having any blood of the African race in their veins.” In Chattanooga, Richmond, and elsewhere, judges and juries were considering a new set of cases on whether the racially ambiguous clans known as Melungeons were black or white, and courts were delineating drop by drop the amount of blood that made a person white or black. Along Rockhouse Creek, census-takers redefined many of the Spencers’ neighbors as mulattoes or Indians.14

  Hiram Strong’s words hovered over the poker table like a storm cloud. They challenged Spencer’s status, and if they attained a wider currency, they could undermine his marriage and portend intrusive and damaging attention from the state. A hard man like Spencer could have responded with his fists, a broken bottle, or worse. He could have taken a buckhorn knife to the doctor’s racial categories—and his throat. But a good poker player is unfazed by a bad hand, or even a string of them; he does not try to change his luck with desperate play. He works patiently and keeps a calm face even when he wins. Spencer let the cloud pass. If he did not take offense, the comment must have been a joke. He shuffled the cards and dealt out a new hand.15

  LETCHER DAVIS DID NOT ARRIVE in Johnson County so much as stray there. He reeled through the hills, soaked with whiskey, angry and excitable like a flash flood. He had a runt’s build, short and wiry, but he scared people. They were struck by his wildness—no easy feat in hills that were full of hot-tempered, hard-drinking men. At his cabin or off wandering, he was coiled for battle.16