Letters to America

by Tom Blair

  My earliest memory is of running headlong toward a great flaming shrubbery of brilliant flowers—rhododendrons, they must have been, they may still sprawl over what used to be the gardens at Clayton’s Ride, now run to wilderness and woodiness. But when I was little, we had slaves to clip and graft them and bring out half a dozen swelling blooms on every stem—scarlet and cream and smoky blue and, as I recalled it, vivid lemon-yellow. But when I told my father this last, one evening when we were reminiscing over a fine brandy, he pulled up and asked me about that in strangely painful detail. And when I had finished telling him again about the big waxy lemon-colored flowers, he looked sadder than I had ever seen before. He asked whether this was all I could bring back to mind—just yellow petals? No silk? No warmth?—and then he told me that there are no lemon-colored rhododendrons, that what I remembered was my mother’s dress of that color as she stood in the great thicket with her arms outspread to catch me.

  To me it was but another patch of color in a world of play and noise; I have no memory at all of her; and it must have been only a few weeks later that my brothers came into this world and owing to a protracted labor and, perhaps, unsteady fingers on the umbilical cord, she was taken from my father. I do remember being lifted up and wept over, mostly against Aunt Hepsibah’s huge black bosom. I had no idea why; but even as a child I did feel that there was something empty at the Ride. Father never looked at another woman, so the twins and I were little kings on the land.

  Great-great-great Grandfather Jack Clayton had come along the coast to grow tobacco. The better story was that his grandfather had been an agent of the sinister “Tapski,” Lord Shaftesbury, whose personal names, Ashley and Cooper, were given to the rivers that flow to Charleston “to form,” as we used to say in youthful times, “the Atlantic Ocean.” The other story, more likely the truth of the matter, was that he was the son of a simple lad from the Cotswolds of England—a simple lad, perhaps, but one of great ambition.

  Great-great Grandfather learned about indigo. But Great-Grandfather saw the possibilities in cotton, and he helped make that crop king.

  The Ride never lacked for money in those days, and we three boys, a little troop of which I was always captain, never lacked for the things we clamored for: ponies; then really fine horses; London guns (we knew how to shoot before we could read and were a danger only to our prey, never to each other or our guests or our hosts away from home); rods and creels, which we packed with rather a curious assortment of fish; little soldier uniforms—and when Scott and Taylor conquered Mexico, how down-in-the-mouth, how chagrined we felt not to be old enough for a real bloody war! Well, one learns.

  As we grew up, we did the rounds of our neighbors’ properties—and not just all the stuff and nonsense you hear about now, about balls and crinolines and duels. We heard Mr. Ruffin, who may have fired the first shot of the war that taught us what war was about, and who certainly shot himself when that war was over, speak brilliantly about reviving exhausted soil and developing a higher agriculture. We heard Mr. Calhoun speaking about the rights of the South in the voice of our archangel. We met Mr. Petigru, the strongest Union man in the state, but a great gentleman and a character of iron courage.

  But, yes, there was a lot of dancing and riding point to point, and, frankly, playing at horseshoes. And I admit, I learned most of my technique from a fellow I could never beat: One-legged Mose, whom we kept on partly because it was our overseer’s fault that the tree fell on him and partly because he was the best horseshoes tutor between Florida and Maryland, scandalize half the county though it did. If Chief Justice John Marshall, when he wasn’t settling the Constitution of the United States, could judge horseshoe throws on his hands and knees with a straw between his teeth, why not us?

  Of course, we were little gentlemen, so cotton money bought us tutors. We had no kind memories of them, but I like to think, even on the other side of the light, that they have worse memories of us. Mr. McTaggart, who taught us proper English and proper English manners, may recall a certain encounter with a billy goat in a locked icehouse. Getting him in there entailed more of a demanding education than anything he managed to teach us directly, because he was not stupid and was much on his guard.

  But, of course, tutors are meant to prepare one for college….

  I had always taken it for granted that I would attend the University of Virginia. The country around Charlottesville was splendid for hunting and the undergraduate body perhaps the most consistently constituted band of gentlemen of any learned body in the then Republic. Moreover, the university was founded by Mr. Jefferson—as he had ordered engraved on his tombstone—and the professors were much respected.

  I had just told Hosey that he would be my body servant—and he was elated, for he had cut all the swathe he could between Graydon’s Roost and the Chattahoochee—when my father laid it down that I would go to Harvard.

  “But I’ll spend four years among bluenosed Yankees!” I fumed.

  “Then you will fully appreciate for the first time the red noses of my friends that you’re always making shameful fun of, once you come back.”

  “They’re malignant abolitionist fanatics!”

  “Then you will get some truly overdue practice in standing up for our most cherished institutions.”

  So I went up by ship from Charleston—roads were still terrible, and the railroad was no closer to home than Columbia, even though we had a locomotive before the Yankees did; a foul stormy voyage, and we nearly foundered off Montauk. Still, we got there; and Mr. Peabody, who had fought alongside Father under Scott in Mexico—though both thought it an unwise war, endangering the Union with quarrels over who was to use the land—had his carriage waiting for me at the dock.

  I dined and slept at his house on State Street, Hosey being put up, amidst a good deal of to-do, with the servants. Mr. Peabody himself was, I could see, more than a little taken aback, not to say distressed, at having a slave in the house—I suppose we had taken Hosey’s status for granted and not mentioned it in our letters. In any event, Hosey was going back once I was settled in, for here he would surely be carried off by abolitionists and told he was free. That was another grievance about having to come to Harvard.

  Next day Mr. Peabody took me to Cambridge in his carriage, and once I had found where I was to stay, I left Hosey to deal with my luggage while Mr. Peabody introduced me to President Walker, whom he had known since they bailed Noah’s Ark together or something of that sort. Reverend Walker was courtesy itself, if a little aloof; I can only say that I am glad that I didn’t find out for a long time that when the college had taken a black undergraduate a couple of years before and the other students threatened to leave, he had only said that if they did, he would see to it that the college’s entire resources were dedicated to educating the boy. When first I heard of this (and, as I say, it took a while; all these high-minded people were too embarrassed to admit how it had showed them up) I was furious; then I was amused; and then I’ll be damned if I didn’t take my hat off to that grim old man. When those people stick to their principles, they’re hard to beat. When they do.

  So I got back from the president’s house, wished Mr. Peabody heartfelt thanks, and hurried up a twisty Bay State staircase—one of the first things I missed were the broad, straight stairways Great-grandfather put in when he rebuilt Clayton’s Ride in the first cotton boom times—and came around the corner on as strange an apparition as I had ever seen.

  Hosey had, no blame to him, got the big japanned trunk that we inherited from Uncle Bullough jammed in an awkward corner on those damnable twisty stairs. Give him a little time and his strong back—and he wasn’t stupid, in a practical, fixing way—and he’d have heaved it up and around all right. But instead, whether helping him or hindering I was not able to tell, was someone, clearly a gentleman, in an enviable broadcloth coat, taking the weight, plus a lot of the five generations of dirt off the staircase wall, as Hosey heaved. Well, one can work with one’s own fellow when the s
ulky has got a wheel into the ditch, but working with someone else’s fellow, when you don’t even know the owner? And that was how I met Oliver Sargent.

  Oliver had more of a go-to-blazes look about him than most of those cod-chomping psalm singers had, a look as if he might really like a fight, and though back home that would have really got my tail feathers up, it’s best not to start something on the other man’s ground before you know your way around; so instead of asking what in damnation he was doing with my body servant, I simply introduced myself. He stood free of the portmanteau—whereupon Hosey got it up three whole stairs without breaking a sweat—passed his hand over his handkerchief, and shook hands, bidding me welcome and asking, probably going by my accent, whether I rode.

  That ice broken, I soon learned the best stables to hire hacks and hunters anywhere in Cambridge, answered a delicate inquiry as to whether I enjoyed cards, and found myself asked with unforced cordiality—though Oliver had never fully taken his eyes off Hosey—to a wine next evening. I explained that I had to be in Boston next day, putting Hosey on the Palmetto State for home; whereupon Oliver’s brow entirely cleared, for, as he later admitted, he intended to take advantage of our chat over sherry to explain that it would truly never do for a bondsman to be fetching and carrying under the sacred damp Massachusetts sun.

  We set forth at once. Oliver walked me around Harvard Yard, showed me the library, the chapel, a very small and flea-bitten-looking band of Indians camping on the college grounds, and argued, shrewdly and amicably, about the proper length of stirrup for going over rough country; and when all was said and done, he said, with the air of one conferring a truly godlike favor, that I must come over to Beacon Hill that Saturday evening and meet his family. It irked me a little that he seemed to make such a suggestion like a command to dine and sleep at Windsor, but these people had a certain provincial pride of ancestry quite startling to those of the South, who received their land patents from good King Charles and came here of their own free will, and not because their affectedly pious ideas made old England too hot to hold ’em. Well, riches are next best to pedigrees, and heaven knows the Sargents had enough of both to enable them to look kings in the eye—“Their merchants are princes,” says Isaiah.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. That Saturday, Oliver drove us into Boston behind a very respectable pair of grays, and we went up into a grand enough house, though I for one cannot even now see how anyone of means can live only a walk apart from his neighbor. Even in those days, we could only see the smoke from Old Man Clement’s house on the far side of Honeysuckle Hill, and if you went behind the stables at sunset, you might catch a flash from the Lowndes’s windows, deep behind their great trees at Mischianza. Our finer Southern homes were, shall I say, clothed in fields and woodlands of a loose fit.

  So I found myself being presented to an elegant-looking lady with the whitest hair I ever saw; very firm manners she had, so that, even if she readily volunteered opinions about political economy and the French emperor and a topic you can very readily guess at, she was still obviously a woman of fine breeding; and an old gentleman who was eating walnuts and seemed to have bitten on a real bad one, until it proved that this was his perpetual expression; but however sour his mouth, his eye was very straight and shrewd. There were a couple of lanky younger brothers, not much for speaking, and when they did not very interesting, but no vice to ’em, as Father used to say about his favorite tracking dogs; and three girls; or rather, two girls and Rebecca.

  She had a name out of Walter Scott, and a touch of romance to match it. She wasn’t tall like the boys—or like her sister Lucinda, whom you could have hammered into the shore at the mouth of Boston Harbor and hung a flag on—nor was she sober and given to good works like the other sister, Kerenhappuch—who was, Oliver later explained to me, shocked that I did not know one of Job’s daughters, and who, I must say, looked as if she had suffered enough. The first thing I knew about Rebecca, just as she came into the drawing room, a tad late for having caught her crinoline on the banisters, was her laugh, and that has never left me.

  Rebecca and my Harvard mate Oliver were certainly the two bright lights of that evening, not I, although I must say that, not having much to say in this new milieu, I accordingly learned a good deal. Thus, when Mrs. Sargent dispraised the European Powers for their treatment of China, it was greatly and instructively amusing to hear one of the younger boys burst out that “to hear this from Mother was a bit rich, considering that Great-grandfather…”—at which there was a clearing of the throats that I swear was the most startling noise I ever heard until the artillery at Gettysburg. Well, that, all unintended, gave so obvious a clue, despite or because of the awful silence that fell amidst Rebecca’s attempts to restart conversation, that it was child’s play to corner one of the sisters later—you may guess which one. And lo and behold, yes, the family fortune did indeed largely begin with whole schoonersful of opium shipped into Canton. Now there was an arrow in my quiver to deal with friend Oliver when he got too high and mighty.

  I’ve no time fully to record those hurrying university years, except to note two matters that now seem, in retrospect, freighted with significance. I rode very rarely unaccompanied by the Sargents, and they showed me their textile mills, from which derived the main part of their mighty fortune. Very imposing and formidable they stood and stand, making anything in the South pale by comparison, and I have to admit they had housed the mill girls very well, with decent dormitories and their own adequate pantry.

  But anything good will encounter competition, and times were growing harder and harder at the company—for the mill girls, anyway, though somehow the Sargents seemed no poorer. My friend Miss Sargent—I might, as you may guess, say more than that—was much distressed, and harried her brother with every patch on some worker girl’s clothes, every fallen-in cheek and exhausted stoop. It was during one of their exchanges I learned they had the wherewithal to ship unmentionables under their flag because earlier they had traded stranger cargoes yet. I was never able to prove that we Claytons bought from Sargent ships at the Long Wharf, but I swear that they descend from the Boston shipmaster in the chantey:

  O Captain Ball was a Yankee slaver,

  Blow, boys, blow.

  He traded in niggers and loved his Savior,

  Blow, my bully boys, blow.

  To be fair, Oliver looked quite pained and told me how much they gave to missionaries in Africa and freed slaves in Liberia.

  Perhaps that gave me another lever against Master Oliver, though I didn’t use it lest I be forbidden the house on Beacon Street, for my feelings, and hers, were not to be denied, and everyone knew how it would come out. Though her mother and her father alike were horrified, I give them their New England due that they let her make her choice—as I don’t think my father would have done, had any sister of mine fallen in love with an abolitionist.

  In 1857, the year Mr. Buchanan became president and we in the South felt that the world was ours—a Northern president utterly bent to our views with Lancashire mills buying every bale we could grow—cotton was king indeed. But then some big insurance company failed in Cincinnati and ruin spread eastward.

  The Sargents rode out the storm—nothing could sink those iron folk—but half their workers didn’t. There were pitiful sights along the road to Lowell. I made myself pretty vocal with what would be said if we treated our people in hard times the way the holy Sargents did theirs. Several of us, not the Sargents, went out there with our pockets full of silver several times a month; but Oliver said they were free to contract where they wished, endowed with liberty, and the sooner they understood the laws of political economics the better for all concerned. He boasted that his father treated his workers as independent adults with a respect that no one who “bartered in lash-cut flesh” could understand, let alone be a sincere Christian.

  I resented this, as you might expect, spoke a few choice words, and shoved him hard, whereupon he used the muscles that had assisted
my trunk upstairs to pitch me downstairs. We had it out, more or less, and got back to being friends again—or better, man to man, if not North to South; for I think we both could see that one day we must have it out army to army, if not pistol to pistol, just as Mr. Calhoun feared. And I admit I was fearful that someone would find out that I had called her brother an uncharitable hypocrite and punched him, and he was, if anything, more afraid that she would find out that he had sent me rolling into the Yard; so I went around in bandages from my “riding accident.”

  I had expected the years in Cambridge to each have more than twelve months, but of course they swept us along as they always do unless one is in pain, danger, or suspense, of which conditions I was soon to have considerable experience. And then, in spite of a couple of scrapes, at races and in episodes with Yankee ranters whom even Oliver wouldn’t stand up for as gentlemen, I more or less got through. Once home, I somehow found myself creating important reasons to return to Boston. Father entirely approved; he was very afraid of looming trouble and wanted to be as well-informed as possible. While home I hunted with my brothers and chatted over wine at Clayton’s Ride and at all the neighbors’ plantations, heartily glad to be back among plainspoken gentlefolk, red-nosed or not, who laid down truths and spoke to the point.

  Grim old Senator Hammond stayed with us during one particular visit by Oliver. He and Oliver at first found mutual intellectual enjoyment; then the senator delivered a magnificent, soaring soliloquy while we enjoyed after-dinner ports. I later learned he had given it in Congress, the first pure and open defense of slavery ever delivered there, that slavery was no evil, rather Providence’s greatest blessing upon the South, enabling it to raise the highest-toned, purest, best-organized society to have existed on Earth, an aristocracy of talent, virtue, generosity, and courage, nurtured by republican openness to rule its natural inferiors with justice and humanity. I could see Sargent’s hands clenching and unclenching in his lap, and if the senator had not been his father’s age, he might have taken advantage of our special ways of honorably asserting our beliefs. But he swallowed, and the topic passed off in an explosion of laughter about the long-armed apelike Lincoln, who was just beginning to be heard about in the South.