Sea to Shining Sea

by Michael Phillips

  I knew the pain over Zack, and what Zack had said, went further inside Pa than he was letting on. Almeda knew, too, how deeply he felt it. But Pa was the kind of man who had to sort things out by himself for a spell before he was ready to talk. I was sure he would let us know what he was feeling once he was ready. In the meantime, he seemed to be putting his efforts into helping Tad figure out his frustrations.

  Whatever Zack might have said, I saw a loving, unselfish man when I looked at Pa. And I wished Zack could see, as I did, how Pa had been a good father to all of us—at least once we’d arrive in California.

  When we first came to California, Zack carried a chip around on his shoulder against Pa for a while, but I thought he’d gotten over all that years ago.

  But I guess I was wrong. All it took for me to forgive Pa was to talk with him a few times and see how his own heart ached over the past. I had seen Pa cry and pray and grow, and I knew what kind of man he was—deep down, on the inside. But maybe he and Zack had never talked that way.

  As I thought about Zack, I realized that when a person isn’t able to forgive someone, a little seed of anger will eventually sprout and grow until branches and roots and leaves of bitterness come bursting out somewhere.

  With Zack, apparently the forgiveness didn’t get finished, and now he was gone. And Pa was feeling one of the deepest pains a man can feel on account of it.

  Meanwhile, other things kept us from thinking only about Zack. The Sunday after Pa and Tad got back from their hunting trip, Aunt Katie and Uncle Nick invited all of us to their place to eat and to have a family visit with them and Edie.

  That day suddenly put Zack into the background of our thoughts for a while, and got me thinking about the dilemma of my decision all over again.

  Chapter 11

  A Heated Discussion About Slavery

  After dinner was over, Almeda and Aunt Katie put Ruth and Anne down to sleep; then the rest of us got to talking.

  Pa had been telling Uncle Nick and Aunt Katie about our trip to San Francisco and about my conversation with Mr. Dalton.

  “So, are you going to do it, Corrie?” Uncle Nick asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’m just waiting to see what might come of it. I said to the Lord that if it was something he wanted me to pursue, then he’d have to make something happen so I’d know it.”

  “How could he do that?” asked Edie.

  “He has lots of ways,” I replied. “I just want to make sure I don’t do something myself. If I just patiently wait, then there’s no danger of making a decision all on my own. When he wants me to move a certain way, maybe in some new direction, then he’ll make sure I get the message. He’ll send someone or some circumstance to give me a nudge.”

  “That sounds like a rather passive approach to life,” said Edie. “I thought all you Californians were pioneers who didn’t wait for anybody but went out and did whatever you wanted to do!”

  We all laughed.

  “Is that what easterners think of Californians?” asked Almeda.

  “That’s what I thought before I became one myself!” said Katie.

  “I don’t mean I just sit by and don’t do anything,” I said to Edie. “I go on about my life as usual. But in making important decisions, I want to be sure I wait for the Lord to have some say in it, too.”

  “So if the Lord gives you the nudge you’re talking about,” Uncle Nick asked again, “then do you figure you’ll do it?”

  “I like what they’re saying about Mr. Lincoln,” I said. “It seems important for the country that he get elected. I suppose I’m thinking that maybe I ought to try to help.”

  “If he wins in November, the whole South will rise up against it,” put in Edie abruptly. “A Lincoln victory will destroy the nation.”

  A moment of silence followed. I think we were all a bit shocked at her strong statement, and no one had expected it of her.

  “Is it really that serious?” Almeda asked after a moment.

  “Before he died, my husband used to say that if the Republicans nominated Lincoln, and if the country elected him, the South would never stand for it. It’s not just the slavery issue, he said, but the whole southern way of life.”

  “How can that way of life be justified when it is based on such a horrid thing as human beings enslaving others of their kind?” Almeda asked. “In Christ’s own words, he came to set people free.”

  “That is an ideal not necessarily found in this life, Almeda. That’s the mistake abolitionists always make—quoting the Bible and talking about God’s hatred of slavery when there is nothing of the kind to be found in the Holy Scriptures.”

  Almeda’s strong feelings surfaced. “You cannot mean you actually believe slavery to be just!” she said. “How can there be any doubt, for a serious-minded Christian, that slavery is wrong?”

  “There are Christians in the South just as well as in the North.”

  “They cannot honestly deceive themselves into thinking slavery is right! It goes against every truth of the Bible.”

  “Abraham had slaves. The Ten Commandments mention slavery twice without disapproving of it. Jesus never uttered a word condemning slavery, although it was widespread in the world at the time he lived. Paul told slaves to obey their masters, and even returned a runaway slave to his master.”

  “It sounds like you met someone who knows her Bible as well as you do, Almeda,” chuckled Uncle Nick.

  “All of what you said may be true, Edie,” said Pa, “but be honest with us. Do people in the South, God-fearing people especially—do they really believe slavery is right, deep down in their hearts?”

  “I can’t speak for everyone, Drummond. All I know is that church leaders and preachers all through the South are just as staunch for slavery as the abolitionists are against it.”

  “What do you think, Katie?” Pa asked.

  Katie hesitated a moment, weighing, I think, how she should answer when the debate was between her own sister and her upbringing in Virginia and her new family, which had no firsthand exposure to the issue at hand.

  “You have to realize,” she said at length, “that slavery was common practice when I was growing up. We were all taught to accept it as the natural order of things between the races—even, some said, for the good of the Negro people. Since coming to California six years ago, I’ve hardly thought about it. All the disputes between the states and all the arguments over whether slavery is right or wrong—that’s risen to new heights since I left. I don’t even know what I think.”

  “Have you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” I asked Edie.

  “Certainly not. Harriet Beecher Stowe is hated in Virginia! That book is full of falsehoods from cover to cover!”

  “I have read that its portrayal of slavery is quite accurate,” said Almeda.

  “Then you must be listening to a northern abolitionist. Everyone in the South knows the book for what it is—a pack of lies.”

  “I want to know something,” I asked. “Why did you say that if Mr. Lincoln wins it will destroy the country?”

  “Because he has been speaking out against slavery for two years, ever since he ran against Douglas for the Senate in ’58. My husband and the men he worked with say Lincoln is sure to attempt to free the slaves. To do so would ruin the South economically. That’s why the southern states would never go along with it.”

  “What would they do?”

  “There is already talk circulating around Virginia of withdrawing from the United States and forming a new country if Lincoln wins.”

  A few gasps went around the room, including one from Katie herself. We all sat in stunned silence a minute. Because of my articles, we always got the Alta. We had read of the growing dispute over slavery between the northern and southern states, and had even seen the word secession more than once. But somehow it hadn’t struck root exactly how serious the division was until Edie began talking about the Southern states forming a new country.

  Uncle Nick br
oke the heavy silence with a laugh. He was probably the least well read of any of us, and the idea of two separate countries, a slave South and a free North, struck him as absolutely preposterous.

  “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard!” he said. “There’s nothing in the South that could keep a country together. The South would die without the North!”

  I could see Edie getting ready to give Uncle Nick a sharp reply, but Pa spoke up first.

  “Don’t be too sure of that, Nick,” he said. “You know about the big collapse of the banks in New York two years ago and all the financial crises it caused.” Pa had read more of the newspapers that came to me than I realized!

  “Not much. Didn’t hurt us here.”

  “Well, it hurt the North, and it still hasn’t recovered all the way. But the South is booming. Their cotton helped save the northern banks. They can sell all they want in Europe. I tell you, Nick, there’s folks saying the South is stronger financially than the North.”

  “There you go sounding like a politician again!” laughed Uncle Nick. “Where do you get all that stuff, Drum?”

  “Well, I figure if I’m gonna have a daughter that writes for the paper, I might as well read it.”

  “I’ve read that too,” said Almeda. “The North needs the South, not the other way around. If the South were to pull out, they would have plenty of resources. The cotton crop would support it.”

  “Exactly!” agreed Edie. “Without the South, the North would perish. If Lincoln dared to tamper with slavery, he would be cutting the throat of the very North he thinks he loves so much. The future of the United States lies south of the Mason-Dixon line.”

  Again there was silence for a while. At last Katie spoke. “After all this, Corrie,” she said, “do you still think you’ll support Lincoln?”

  “I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “I suppose there’s more to the decision than I thought at first.”

  Chapter 12

  I Question Myself

  It was a hard dilemma.

  Now all of a sudden the slavery issue wasn’t two thousand miles distant but right in my own backyard, even right in my own family. It had hardly occurred to me before that Katie had, indeed, come from a slave state. We had never talked about it. But now Edie’s arrival, and her strong views on the subject, brought the debate closer to home.

  In spite of everything she said, in my own heart and mind I couldn’t see how slavery could be anything but wrong. It couldn’t be right to treat other people the way slaves were treated! I was in agreement with Mr. Lincoln.

  But what if it was true that his election could spell ruin to the country? What if his election caused an even more serious rift between North and South than already existed? Did I want to be part of contributing to that? What would it all mean to California?

  I found myself wondering about my responsibility as a writer and a Christian in a lot of new ways. If people really were paying attention to what I said, I had to be sure of myself when I put my pen to the paper. What if I said something wrong, something that readers believed and took action on? I would be responsible for misleading them.

  Always before, I’d written about things because I was interested in them. That’s why I started writing—because it was something I wanted to do for myself. I wanted to express my thoughts and feelings. And there were so many things I wanted to explore! Writing seemed the natural way to express what was inside me, to communicate, even to grow as a person. That’s what my journal was to begin with—just a diary of my own thoughts and feelings. It had never been meant for anybody else.

  I reflected on Ma, on things she’d said to me. I had always been a reader and more quiet than outgoing. She’d made no secret of thinking I’d probably never get married. She figured I ought to read and write and keep a diary so I could be a teacher when I got older and no man would have me.

  I had done what Ma said, even though I sometimes ached when I realized it took her dying to get me started. Writing in my diary back then had been a way of letting the pain out.

  I was twenty-three now, and I had books and books of diaries and journals! That first beautiful book Almeda had given me, with The Journal of Corrie Belle Hollister stamped across the front of it, had been the first of many such volumes I had filled with memories and recollections and drawings over the years.

  At first Pa and Uncle Nick had kidded me about always writing down what I was thinking. But once the articles started, and payments of two, and then four, and then even eight dollars started to come in for things I’d written, they realized maybe it was a worthwhile thing for me to be doing, after all. But even then it was just my writing.

  Then gradually my writing started getting bigger than just my own personal, private thoughts. Especially as I’d written about the two elections back in 1856, I had thought a lot about truth and trying to tell the truth to people. Even from men like Derrick Gregory and Mr. Royce, I had learned a thing or two about truth and being fair. I tried to learn from everybody I met, although men like that probably had no idea they were helping to teach me and show me things, even by their deceit.

  Yet I don’t think it ever really struck me that anything I might say was important . . . not really important. I was trying to learn about truth and being a good reporter, but I figured that it was still mostly for me. Robin O’Flaridy still looked down on me, even after the ’56 elections; my story had never appeared, and Mr. Fremont had lost the election. Nothing I had done or said had been that important, and I had gone back to writing about people and floods and how things were in California now that the gold rush was slowing down.

  Mr. Kemble kept telling me that my articles were getting a wider audience in the East on account of a woman reporter being so unusual, but I didn’t think much about it. I knew of plenty of women authors and it didn’t seem so unusual. Julia Ward Howe wrote poems, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott wrote, too. I didn’t see what was so unusual about what I did. After all, Mrs. Alcott’s poems and stories were being published in the Atlantic Monthly.

  “None of those women are writing for newspapers, Corrie,” Mr. Kemble said to me. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Newspapers influence people. All those other women are just writing stories. They can get as famous as you please, but they’re not going to be taken as seriously as a nonfiction news reporter.”

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin has influenced a lot of people,” I said.

  “It’s sold a million copies,” he replied. “But it’s still just a story.”

  “You can’t say Mrs. Stowe isn’t an influential writer.”

  “She is indeed. Her book probably has started more fights and brawls and arguments than any book ever published in this country. But she’s still just a novelist. You, on the other hand, Corrie Belle Hollister—you are more than a novelist. You are a newspaper reporter. And while it may be true that when you first came in here with little stories about leaves and blizzards and apple seeds and new schools and colorful people you had met, tricking me into thinking you were a man—”

  I glanced up at him, but the little curl of his lip and twinkle in his eye told me he was just having fun with me. He never lost an opportunity to remind me of my first byline: C.B. Hollister.

  “As I was saying,” he went on, “at first I may have published some of your stories as a lark, just for the novelty of showing up some of the other papers with something by a young woman. But I’ve got to admit you surprised me. You kept at it. You didn’t back down from me, or from the odds that were against you, not from anything. You proved yourself to be quite a tenacious, plucky young woman, Corrie. In the process, I’ll be darned if you didn’t start writing some pretty fair stories and getting yourself quite a following of readers—women and men.”

  He stopped and looked me over as he did from time to time, kind of like he was thinking the whole thing through all over again, wondering how he’d gotten himself into the fix of having a woman on his staff.

  “So that�
��s why,” he went on after a minute, “you’re different, Corrie. Your name might not be as famous as Mrs. Stowe’s. A hundred years from now nobody’ll know the name Corrie Hollister, because newspapers get thrown away, while books don’t. But right now, people are listening to what you say, Corrie. I tell you, you’ve got an influence that you don’t realize.”

  His words kept coming back to me as I debated with myself about what I ought to do, especially after all Edie Simpson had said. It was more than just journal writing now.

  What if . . . what if something I said or wrote really did influence the election? Even if I caused only one or two people to vote differently than they might have otherwise, it was still a sobering responsibility.

  I did a lot of talking to the Lord about it in the days after Pa and I got back from San Francisco, running the pros and cons through my mind, and always remembering Pa’s words on the boat. You never know what might be around the corner, and so you ought to be watching and paying attention as best you can. I knew Pa was doing the same thing, both about his decision and about Zack’s leaving.

  Ordinarily I would have talked to him or Almeda. But with slavery and the North-South dispute and the heated difference of opinion about Mr. Lincoln, I thought this was a decision I had to make alone—just between me and the Lord.

  After the discussion at Uncle Nick and Aunt Katie’s, I was growing more and more sure that slavery was wrong and should be abolished. But I saw more clearly now that there might be consequences—not only to my decision, but to the whole outcome of the election—that no one could predict. It might even mean disputes in our own family.

  In my heart I found myself wanting to do it. I wanted my writing to matter for the sake of truth. If Mr. Lincoln and the antislavery people and the Republican party represented that truth, then I wanted to be part of helping people know it. But I had to be sure. So I found myself telling the Lord that I wouldn’t do anything further, and that if I was supposed to get any more involved, he would have to make it clear by having somebody contact me, or by sending along some circumstance I couldn’t ignore. I didn’t want to initiate anything more all by myself.