The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “Grandfather,” said George, “why is it that you never say more of those days?”

  “What is there to say, now that the document is torn in half?”

  “Two sections clash over a philosophy of governance.” Bartlett always sought the grandest way to state himself. “The Framers anticipated such things, did they not?”

  “They did not anticipate armed rebellion. And enslaving twenty percent of your own population is not a philosophy of governance. It’s an … an …” The old man stopped speaking, his eyes went to the window, to the blue sky above the road.

  George and Bartlett waited through one of their grandfather’s little “blank spots.” They could not have known that his mind was drifting back to a road on a misty evening, a young woman asking his opinion of the Triangle Trade … What was her name?

  “Grandfather?” said George. “You were saying … slavery is—”

  “Oh … oh … yes … an abomination.”

  “Didn’t they compromise over slavery at the convention?” asked George.

  “They compromised over many things. They had to. But we’ve plain forgot the ideals that brought us to Philadelphia.” Then he looked down and began tapping his cane on the floorboards.

  George prodded him, “You knew Rufus King, didn’t you?”

  The old man nodded, eyes still on the floor. “Knew him. Served him. Knew the other New Englanders, too.”

  “Did they voice opinions about slavery?” asked Bartlett.

  The old man looked up. “What does it matter?”

  “If we knew what they thought,” said Bartlett, “we might know how to think.”

  “People should think for themselves,” said George. “But an intelligent man looks to his ancestors for guidance.” Bartlett gave his grandfather a fawning smile. “Isn’t that so, sir?”

  Old Will Pike studied the young men, sucked on his cheek, and said, “I don’t speak much about Philadelphia because I didn’t stay through the whole business.”

  “You didn’t?” said Bartlett. “Why?”

  “Can you boys keep a secret?”

  George and Bartlett looked at each other. A secret? Of course.

  So Will said, “I lost a first draft of the Constitution. Worse than that, Rufus King and the other New Englanders wrote on it, wrote their ideas on the Bill of Rights.”

  “Lost it?” said George.

  “What happened to it?” asked Bartlett.

  “Couldn’t say. It’s been more than seventy years. Last I knew, it was in the hands of a land grabber from New Hampshire named Caldwell P. Caldwell.”

  Bartlett Pike had a capacity for making a range of noises that involuntarily proclaimed his opinions, moods, and appetites. Just then, his stomach rumbled. He looked down, pressing a hand against his midsection.

  The old man snarled, “I’m about to tell you boys things I’ve told no man in a generation, and you’re worried about your belly. Well, the chowder will stay hot awhile longer. So listen. The both of you.”

  THE NEXT DAY, George climbed to the cupola, and there was Bartlett, staring out as the sun rose above the trees.

  Without turning, Bartlett said, “Do you believe what Grandfather told us yesterday?”

  “Why not? At his age, it’s time for his Apologia pro vita sua.”

  Bartlett gave a whoosh of awe. “Imagine … he looked Washington in the eye.”

  “Washington looked him in the eye. I expect he was blinded by the light.”

  “I would be, too, but … do you think it’s out there? A draft of the Constitution, annotated by the New England delegates?”

  “Maybe, but as Grandfather says, it’s been seventy years.” They stood together in silence for a time. Then George offered Bartlett his hand. “So long, cousin. My last day.”

  “Until next summer, then.”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “Not coming back?” Bartlett’s face brightened, as though this was something he had long been hoping to hear.

  George looked into Bartlett’s eyes. “ ‘At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me / Forwards, forwards o’er the starlit sea’—Matthew Arnold.”

  “What? What do you mean?” Bartlett might be confused, but he was still smiling.

  “Our talk with Grandfather,” said George. “It convinced me. I don’t want my adventures kept secret until I’m old. I want to live them and relive them when I talk about them. So you get to run the mill when the time comes. You’re made for it. Grandfather knows that.”

  Bartlett snorted: “He thinks I’m fat. Like my father. Fat and officious and good for nothing but adding columns and keeping scrapbooks about the history of the mill.”

  “Prove him wrong,” said George.

  Down below, a black wagon rattled up. On the side were the words, JOSIAH JOHNSON HAWES, PHOTOGRAPHER. That day all the executives and workers of the mill, from the venerable Will Pike to the lowliest bobbin boy, an immigrant named Khouri from someplace called Lebanon, were assembling for a photograph, “The Men and Women of the Mill, 1861.” It was Bartlett’s idea.

  “I’ll stay for the picture”—George looked toward a train steaming out of town—”then I’ll follow the smoke.”

  GEORGE AND HIS father followed the smoke home to Portland. Along the way, they concluded that if the soldiers of the North did not defeat the South, the rivers of New England surely would, because the rivers ran the factories, and the factories would overwhelm the South with guns, uniforms, shoes, belts, buckles, cannonballs, nails, rivets, tin cans, and a thousand other products of the modern world.

  Father and son discussed the industry they saw in riverside towns like Whitinsville, in riverhead cities like Worcester, and at simple mill crossings like Newton Lower Falls. But as they came into Boston, Reverend Jacob changed the direction of their talk: “You know, son, across the river is the Harvard Divinity School.”

  George lifted his gaze from a volume of poems by Whitman. “Yes, Father.”

  “Could you see your way to studying there? It’s the seat of Unitarianism.”

  “After I graduate, I’ll have had my fill of study.”

  “Perhaps, but I sense that the mill is more for Bartlett than you. So what about settlement in a solid congregation?”

  “Settlement is not on my mind. Not in the mill, certainly not in the pulpit.”

  “I see.” Reverend Jacob looked out the window and spoke hardly a word for the rest of the journey.

  It was a relief for George to reach Portland that evening and replace his father’s angry silence with the chatter of his mother.

  Amanda Pike Amory, fifty-nine, was the youngest child of Will and Mary. She had not been a beauty. That explained why she had made it to the age of thirty-eight before she married a widowed minister passing through Millbridge.

  As the reverend, in one of his less charitable moments (which were many) said of their courtship, “Even an ugly woman looks good to a man over fifty, if she knows how to cook.”

  Amanda also knew how to talk, and she and her son talked for days. They talked in the parsonage. They talked as they strolled past schooners and steamers at the waterfront. They talked as they climbed the Munjoy Hill tower, from which observers had signaled the arrival of ships in the days before telegraph. On a brilliant September morning, the tower offered views of the infinite Atlantic, the embracing Casco Bay, and the White Mountains, too.

  But their attention was drawn to a Maine regiment training on the hillside below. Perhaps it was the sight of the columns parading, or the sound of drums beating and sergeants shouting that caused George’s mother to say, “Your father fears that you are going to go to war.”

  “Is that why he prefers divinity school for me?”

  “He has your best interests at heart.”

  “There’ll be no war for me, mother,” he said. “But no divinity school, either.”

  “That’s what I hoped you’d say.” She took his hands in both of hers. “Go to Europe after you graduat
e. Study languages and literature. Bring a bit of culture back to the dollar-mad mill barons of New England.”

  And however distant George felt from his father was how close he felt to his mother’s love.

  BOWDOIN COLLEGE WAS thirty miles up the coast, far enough that George’s father would not bother him, close enough that he could visit his mother on occasion. It was a campus almost as old as the Constitution, with quadrangles of ancient red brick and squares of modern gray granite. But the spiritual center of college and town was the Congregational Church, which some said was the also spiritual center of the anti-slavery movement itself.

  On a Sunday ten years earlier, the wife of Calvin Stowe, professor of Natural and Revealed Religion, had experienced a “vision” during a service there. She had seen an old slave, after a life of suffering, rise over the pulpit and up to heaven. And right then, she had determined to write a book she would call Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Stowes had moved on, but they still cast a long shadow in Brunswick and the book cast an even longer one across America.

  As George ambled up from the town, however, he was lost in a vision of his own: Her name was Cordelia Edwards.

  She was the daughter of Professor Aaron Edwards, who lectured in English literature and was known for classroom evocations of Shakespearean characters, from gloomy Hamlet to ebullient Falstaff. George had met her in the spring, and they had exchanged letters during his summer of mill imprisonment. In her last, she had promised him a kiss when he returned to school.

  But Professor Edwards kept a close eye on his daughter, and he had already warned George, “Her name may be Cordelia, but she is my Miranda, my magical child, and you, my young Unitarian friend, are no Ferdinand.”

  As the semester unfolded, George and Cordelia saw each other when they could, but Bowdoin was a demanding place, and Professor Edwards a jealous father. So George was surprised to receive an invitation to dine at the Edwards house on the first Sunday of November.

  THE DAY WAS cold but clear. The sun sent flat rays through the branches, illuminating everything in what George’s father had once called the “fool’s-gold brightness of November.” By four o’clock, darkness would fall and Maine’s long winter night would begin. And so would it be, his father had preached, for those who did not heed God’s word but preferred the “fool’s-gold brightness of gaudy sin.”

  Before George struck the knocker, the door opened and Cordelia appeared in a blue dress with a wide hoop and a velvet jacket a shade darker. The color brought out the blue in her eyes. The sunlight dazzled her smile.

  “Why Mr. Amory,” she said, “how kind of you to come.”

  He took her hand and brought it to his lips, maintaining the air of elaborate formality. “The pleasure is all mine, miss.”

  “You save me from a ghastly afternoon,” she whispered, then nodded toward the parlor: several conversations under way, several groups of people, several of them holding glasses of sherry. “My father said I could invite a friend. He did not specify gender.”

  George’s eyes widened. “But he knows I’m coming?”

  “When I told him, he said, ‘Now we’ll see if he can hold up his end of a conversation.’ So”—she poked a finger into his upper arm, a gesture he found surprisingly intimate—”be fascinating.”

  That, he thought, was like the charge to be witty, or intelligent, or any other quality that came easily when unbidden but might not be raised by all the muses when most needed.

  “Ah, my boy, welcome.” The broad-beamed Aaron Edwards approached, his attitude professorial and paternal, that is to say, condescending and lordly. He ushered George into the parlor, introducing him to President Woods, Professor Smithson, and the ostensible guest of honor, Calvin Stowe, who had returned to preach that Sunday.

  But the real guest of honor in any room in the North, and a pariah in any Southern parlor, was Reverend Stowe’s wife. She was a small woman with a receding chin and ringlets of hair woven down around her face, no great presence at all.

  But before her, George was struck all but dumb, “I … I like your book, ma’am.”

  “Thank you.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s smile revealed protruding upper teeth that somehow balanced her chin and gave her face a happy symmetry.

  “I … I …” George fumbled for something fascinating.

  And George’s rhetoric professor, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, arrived to rescue him. “George has memorized passages from your work, ma’am.”

  “Well, Lawrence,” she said, “you heard the work as I wrote it. I hope you memorized a few of the ideas, at least.”

  “Those of us who attended your Saturday night readings shall never forget them.”

  “So long ago, Lawrence,” she said. “You’ve gone a bit gray since then.”

  Chamberlain smoothed a hand over his hair. And yes, several gray strands marched east and west from his part, but still he had an aura of youthful seriousness, as if he had not yet grown the shell that accretes around men after a bit of experience in the world. He was thirty-three, near six feet, with a sharp-featured face, side whiskers, rimless spectacles, and a high collar that held his head in alignment, giving him the air of a stiff-necked north woods preacher. But he had humor in him, too, and he joked with Mrs. Stowe that it was students like George who made him gray….

  Just then, the dinner bell rang and the guests turned for the dining room.

  In his best sotto voce, George thanked Chamberlain for rescuing him.

  “You’ve studied rhetoric with me,” whispered Chamberlain, as he offered his arm to his wife. “You should have more to say to America’s most famous author.”

  “I’ll try, sir.” George turned to Cordelia and crooked his elbow in her direction.

  She took it and whispered, “Remember, George, ‘fascinating’ does not mean ‘frightened into speechlessness.’ Redeem yourself at dinner.”

  All through the meal, George waited for his moment.

  Neither oyster stew nor a second-course tureen of duck liver pâté stimulated his eloquence. The baked haddock inspired no more than a comment on the bravery of Grand Banks fishermen who caught it. As for a foul course of wild turkey, its best attribute was stuffing.

  Mostly George listened and spoke when spoken to. Yes, he worked summers at the Pike Mill…. Yes, they were worried about cotton supplies from the South…. Yes, he had taken Professor Chamberlain’s rhetoric course, and now that the professor was teaching the modern languages of Europe, George was taking German.

  “Are you planning to use the German someday?” asked Professor Stowe.

  “I’m hoping to travel to Europe after graduation.”

  “Europe?” Cordelia sounded surprised, as if this was something he should have told her before sharing with the world.

  Again Chamberlain rescued him: “Perhaps military service might postpone that trip? I’ve seen you watching the Bowdoin Guard drilling on campus.”

  “The Bowdoin Guard”—Professor Edwards made a dismissive wave of his fork—”college boys with guns, marching about, playing at soldiers.”

  “Perhaps, but”—President Woods looked at Chamberlain—”I’ve seen our new chairman of European Languages watching them, too.”

  Chamberlain said, “I’m spending my sabbatical in Europe, sir, to study those languages.”

  “Good,” said Professor Edwards. “Bowdoin needs you more than Lincoln does. If you were to leave, you might be replaced by a Unitarian instead of a Congregationalist. Can’t have that, can we, George?”

  George knew this old Congregationalist was putting him on the spot. In certain corners of New England, hostility between the sects ran high. Traditional Congregationalists, who descended directly from the Puritans, resented the rise of what they called the Boston religion, with its emphasis on free will and free thought and the free interpretation of Christ’s message.

  George’s response to the professor was to stammer.

  That seemed to satisfy Edwards, who pressed ahead. “Another Uni
tarian would throw off the balance in the faculty altogether. Leave the Unitarians at Harvard.”

  “Yes,” said President Woods. “We struggle for the soul of the college,”

  “We struggle for the soul of the nation, too,” said Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  “The South will be finished by fall,” said President Woods.

  “Rather than finishing them,” said Professor Edwards, “we should let them go. See how long their ‘peculiar institution’ lasts without New England mills to buy their cotton, eh, George?”

  Again, George stammered, felt himself redden at a reference to the family business. He glanced at Cordelia, who frowned.

  Professor Edwards kept talking, “Less blood will be spilled and the pain in Southern pocketbooks will be just as acute.”

  “But they’ve challenged the Constitution,” said Chamberlain, with sudden vehemence. “They’ve defied the honor and authority of the Union.”

  “Some in the South see it as a voluntary union,” said Edwards, “and the Constitution as merely a guideline.”

  George was looking at Cordelia, who was glaring at him, as if he had betrayed her by ineloquence.

  Something fascinating, he was thinking. Say something fascinating. So he cleared his throat, lowered his voice, and offered this: “Speaking of the Constitution, did you know that there exists a first draft, annotated by all the New England delegates?”

  “Indeed?” said Professor Edwards.

  “Indeed,” said George. “I’ve heard that it may contain their thoughts on slavery.”

  “How … fascinating.” Cordelia’s expression softened.

  “Yes … fascinating,” said Professor Edwards. “Though, of course, we know that nothing was meant to leave Independence Hall, nothing meant to circulate until the work was completed and agreed upon.”

  “According to my grandfather, the New England delegates—what’s the word?—caucused after the draft was distributed. It was there that they set down their thoughts on the Bill of Rights.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find such a thing,” said Mrs. Stowe, “as our country struggles over the meaning of that Constitution once again?”