by Norman Lock
On Independence Day in 1856, Pierce ordered troops stationed at Fort Leavenworth and Fort Riley, Kansas, to Topeka—there to disband the Free State convention, convened after a congressional investigation had found that the proslavery government at Lecompton had been illegally elected. Thousands of Missourians had crossed into Kansas to vote against a Free State. Armed men bent on stuffing ballot boxes had undermined democracy in the territory.
I have a yellowing scrap of vociferous prose by Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow, ripped from the Squatter Sovereign. (I could not help remembering the young typesetter at Hannibal.) The article asservated (there’s a bloody word!) his faction’s commitment “to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose.”
I copied it in a letter to you, and you wrote back, “Thus do the words of Butchers enter the Gazette, while those of the Bakers of Bread and Makers of Candlesticks go unnoticed and unheard.” You understand the language men use to incite, to wound, to crush, and to damn. Your poems sometimes bleed.
“I write from the heart,” you once said. “All else is penmanship.” Yours is like the tracks of some small, nervous bird in the snow.
One letter from that time seemed to have been written by staggering fingers.
March 26
He, to whom I might have yielded without the Warrant, is dead. The Bolt arrived—I heard the thundering recessional—and left my heart undressed against the stunning CHILL.
Your Widowed Emily
I guessed that it was your father’s clerk, Benjamin Newton, who had died, and I was glad because you had cared for him.
Those were violent, lawless years, when the territory was splintered by the passions and prejudices of men, most of whom were too poor to own slaves. They seemed to have nothing to do with us as we hunted Indians on the other side of the Mississippi. But a rag of char cloth and a phosphorus match can burn down a forest, and a cannon shot can start a war, whose real origins go unnoticed. History is a bluff: Time’s true story is told in the bones of a million buffalo and a million humans, in a single bullet fated centuries before to find its mark, in a man raised up in goodness and laid low by hatred, or in someone else who lived in anonymity and died in obscurity but contributed, nonetheless, to a chain of events ending in catastrophe. I’m not a historian, and this account of the Border War is the merest sketch and no more a facsimile of events than a tintype is of a human being.
The last act of the tragedy of Bleeding Kansas was the massacre beside the Marais des Cygnes River. A fragile peace would follow, until all strife was subsumed under the Civil War, which made the bloody grappling that preceded it seem innocent.
On May 19, 1858, Charles Hamilton, a proslaver, crossed into Kansas Territory with thirty Ruffians on some mischief. On their way back to Missouri, they captured eleven Free Staters, none of whom was armed. Hamilton marched them into a ravine and, before ordering his men to shoot, fired the first bullet to prove his mettle or, perhaps, to satisfy desire, whose consummation is sometimes murder. Only five Kansas men were killed that day, but their deaths outraged the North. (Lieutenant Pearson would have scoffed to hear the “incident” called a massacre.)
Perhaps you read the poem by John Greenleaf Whittier—these lines in particular:
With a vain plea for mercy
No stout knee was crooked;
In the mouths of the rifles
Right manly they looked.
How paled the May sunshine,
O Marais du Cygne!
On death for the strong life,
On red grass for green!
I’ve seen that “red grass.” I wonder if Whittier, a Quaker, has, though I admire his boldness as an abolitionist. I read “Le Marais du Cygne” in The Atlantic Monthly. Have you sent them any of your things? To my ear, he is a great poet. Frankly, your verses vex me. A rubble of broken sentences, pretty fragments. A tiny universe of words wrenched from common parlance and imprinted with your own private legend. Is swan in your Lexicon, along with mermaid, hummingbird, fly, and the irritable gnat?
What if each night a word or two departed from your Lexicon? Would the world grow less—the universal dictionary having been abridged? Would the universe diminish as it would if an astronomer, having trained his telescope on the night sky, discovered that Mars had vanished? What if I should shut my eyes tonight and say the Lord’s Prayer, only to find that I had no word for Heavenly Father? In time, the astronomer would forget there’d been a fourth planet from the sun named Mars, and I that there had ever been words commending my soul to His mercy. We would live, henceforth, without Mars and mercy; we would make do.
These are the thoughts that come to a man who cannot always fall asleep during the terrible hours between Vigils and Matins. I’ll tell you one last story of my time in Springfield before it passes into memory—or history; they are, I sometimes think, one and the same.
–10–
IN THE SUMMER OF 1856, I came down with “yellow jack.” It was another of the beads—I can scarcely call them “pearls”—strung on the thread of my autobiography, a thread as fine as what the spider spins and as adamantine as the cable with which John Roebling knits his suspension aqueducts and bridges. That sickness nearly unto death was the most disturbing episode during my residency at the fort, which was, except for occasional melees with the savages, peaceable. (Outside our jurisdiction, Bleeding Kansas would be left to other men to staunch.) Gripped by the illness, I prayed incoherently, unless it was the natural language of angels or of Eden that I spoke—a fiery Pentecostal tongue prompted by fever. Yellowed by jaundice and parched with thirst, I cast out of myself not devils, but what the Spanish call vómito negro.
The sickness was thought to travel in the holds of steamboats, like weevils in cotton bales. A scourge on us, it came upriver from New Orleans and Mississippi and into the slave pens and warehouses at St. Louis. Some maintain that the soldiers returning from the Mexican occupation brought the fever with them into towns and forts far north of its natural range. (If this was the case, then the “greasers” were taking their revenge.)
During the three days of my “harrowing”—call it that—I had a dream, a single dream, as it seems to me now. I was on my way home from Mexico. I carried a sugar skull, which I never put down until I arrived at your house. It was night, the house silent. In the parlor, Edward was lying in a coffin lighted by tall candles. You sat at a dining table like Miss Havisham’s in Dickens’s Great Expectations, shrouded in spiders’ webs, felted with dust, and garlanded with ancient orange blossoms, which, though dead for half a century, miraculously had not dropped their petals. I laid the skull before you like an offering to Mictecacihuatl. You stared at it and then, having picked it up at last, began to eat it.
“Me encanta el sabor de la muerte,” you said. “I love the taste of death.”
On the third day of my illness, the fever let go its hold. I was too worn and wearied to leave the infirmary. The doctor, a captain and a self-styled atheist, interrogated me playfully.
“Having escaped the jaws of death and being a spiritual man, did you see, perchance, an angel or the Grim Reaper with his hourglass and scythe? Or might you have noticed a shining light without apparent source, as some have claimed during their reconnaissance in the world to come? I’ve not had an opportunity to scout the borderlands, except as ether affords, and I’m curious to know what I shall discover in the great beyond.”
“I saw nothing,” I said brusquely, unwilling to tell him my dream, which was a private matter.
“Pity,” said the doctor. “Have you read Edgar Poe’s tale ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’?”
“I have not.”
“It’s a perfect horror! I’ll tell it to you, if you like. It should be of special relevance.”
Do you know t
he story, Emily? It is a perfect horror.
In Poe’s tale, Ernest Valdemar, in the final stage of consumption, allows himself to be mesmerized while on his deathbed by a friend hoping that the dying man will be capable of reporting his sensations at the point of death. That point, however, becomes an unexpectedly protracted one. Valdemar endures seven months of hypnagogia, a state of suspended animation, in which one is neither asleep nor awake, dead nor alive. At the end of Poe’s tale, the mesmerist questions the still-dying man—or so he is believed to be—hoping to hear what it is that waits for us all.
“‘M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?’
“‘For God’s sake!—quick!—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken me!—quick!—I say to you that I am dead!’”
Abruptly awakened from his mesmeric trance, Valdemar disintegrates without betraying the secret of the afterlife.
“Had you the opportunity, would you communicate conclusive proof that God exists to all the unbelievers and skeptics, as well as those others torn between faith and doubt?” asked the inquisitorial doctor after having finished his synopsis of Poe’s story. “Or proof that He is not? What a service to humankind you would perform, Robert, though the clergy would find itself unemployed!”
“The Bible is proof and assurance enough,” I said, lying.
“A mealymouthed prig of a parson would say that!” he replied contemptuously.
I closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep.
“Be careful you don’t follow M. Valdemar into his special hell,” admonished the doctor with glee. Quoting from another of Poe’s infernal works, he gibbered theatrically, “‘. . . it was dark—all dark—the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that endureth for evermore.’”
I struggled to keep my eyes closed, so as not to let him see my terror. Never mind that I was a Christian and a minister, I hated the man!
Earlier, I wrote that your verses seem like rubble. Maybe this is as it should be. At some point in its history, one cannot tell if a house is being built or torn down. Rubble, possibly, is all of which we can be certain. I’ve never been to Rome, but a priest I met during the late war told me that the walls of the Coliseum bear the teeth marks of time. Time rends; we rend one another; all is ruin and catastrophe. When setting out to write the book I mentioned earlier—the one I could not bring myself to burn—I had thought that there was no fact or feeling that could not be caught with words. I was wrong. Your poems are sieves that catch at least something of the wreckage.
Do you fear death in whatever likeness it will choose to show itself? I’d rather meet the Grim Reaper with his scythe than the hideous and unseen cause of yellow fever, cholera, or lockjaw. Give me a death, an angel, a demon I can see! My faith has not the strength to overcome death’s uncertainty, never mind its sting.
In Utah, I became an angel of death when I reaped a blasted soul.
–11–
WHEN THE MORMON PIONEERS IMMIGRATED to the Great Basin after their expulsion from Illinois, they settled in what was then Mexico’s northern wilderness, which once had belonged to the Indians. After our annexation of Mexican territory, the Mormons again found themselves living in the United States. For them, as for the Indians, there could be no escaping the juggernaut. History is a backward glance to the first murder, the first theft, the first instance of lawlessness, the first usurper and belligerent, whose name was Cain.
I arrived in the territory in the fall of 1857. Had I been clothed in the white samite of righteousness, I could have howled anathemas against the Mormons, as most good Christians did. My brothers of the cloth were horrified by plural marriage and the so-called gold plates shown in a vision to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni. Religious persons of that time, or this, would never acknowledge that God might have left His holy writ far from Palestine, on a hill in Manchester, New York. Were he alive, I do believe most Americans would have wished Joseph Smith nailed to a cross for the mischief he’d caused. If they could have laid their hands on his bones, they’d have ground them into dust—or, being a practical people—into fertilizer, the ignoble end for bison bones.
Having little faith left in the church, in the goodwill of the United States, or in myself, I did not much care which side in the rebellion prevailed. I was, however, made uncomfortable by the bloodlust common to them both. Had my hearing been uncanny like the dog’s, I might have heard the ancient chain that holds fast earth to heaven groan—to strike a pretty figure—its iron links having rusted during merciless ages past. I might’ve been living among the Aztecs, waiting at the foot of the Pyramid of the Moon for a gutted corpse to be flung down and its severed head placed devoutly on the wall of skulls.
Let me set down a gloss of the Utah War’s politics and conduct before I confess my sin. I know that you don’t care much for history, Emily, but most of us are forced to live within its coils, in a wider, more turbulent world than the Homestead and the Evergreens or the verses of Elizabeth Browning. (Or do I wrong you?) Whatever you may think of it, history is essential to the understanding of my story, which is threaded through the nation’s own. Had I gone to preach in some New England town, time’s needle would still have snagged me, as it does everyone. Each of us is a separate thread wound on the same spool.
Popular sovereignty, a dogma upheld by the Democratic Party in some measure to protect the South’s “peculiar institution,” led—by one of history’s unforeseen roundabouts—to the Utah War, or “Mormon Rebellion,” as we called it. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s old adversary from Illinois, had not defended the “Saints” because he was tolerant of their views; his espousal of popular sovereignty and the maintenance of slavery demanded it. He’d have contradicted his party’s chief tenet had he advocated the rights of the proslavery faction but denied Mormons the prerogatives of ecclesiastical government and plural marriage. They called it “celestial,” to put a pleasing face on infamy.
When the Democrat James Buchanan took office in March 1857, he intended to unwind Mormonism, abhorrent to Americans because of polygamy, from the tightening noose of popular sovereignty, which would, in just a few years, choke the union almost past reviving. Stephen Douglas, like many other Democrats, was now insisting that the Mormon “ulcer” be cut out.
In June, Buchanan declared the Territory of Utah to be in rebellion for refusing to submit to authority—not that in heaven, but the greater one in Washington. In July, 2,500 soldiers left Fort Leavenworth to depose Brigham Young as Utah’s territorial governor and to install a “Gentile” in his place. The Utah Expedition would be the scalpel to rid the territory of its distemper.
By late summer, Young had declared martial law, fortified the passes leading to Salt Lake Valley, recalled the missionaries, and raised the Nauvoo Legion, the Mormon militia, to defend Zion against the federal invaders. Lot Smith and a detachment of militia engaged our army at the border of the “Kingdom of God.” That fall, Smith’s men burned fifty-two provisions wagons destined for the expeditionary force. That winter, we were forced to bivouac at the foot of the Wahsatch Mountains, in the ruins of Fort Bridger, burned by the Legion in anticipation of our attack. Without adequate shelter and supplies, we were cold, hungry, and miserable.
I’m a New Englander and used to the cold, but nothing had prepared me for the hardships of a Utah winter under canvas, with scarcely a wall of the old fort left standing to protect us from the icy winds. Again and again, the snow would fall, and we’d try to keep pace with our shovels. At first, men of lower rank did the work, but soon we all lent a hand. It was the only way to keep warm. I’d shiver, shovel, sweat, stop, freeze, and shovel—all the while thinking of you, snug in your “mansion,” with fires burning in the grates. In the end, I put my books in the stove to enjoy a temporary respite from that chill and futile cycle. I burned Hamlet, Timon of Athens, and The Winter’s Tale first, Washington Irving’s comic history of Manhattan next, and finally Milton’s Paradise Lost—for its lake of fire. I kept the Bi
ble partly because of a superstitious fear of its desecration, partly because, as a chaplain, I required it. I preached each Sunday, though it was the hymns the men enjoyed because they could bellow their lungs and stamp their feet and ignite a tiny fire in their bones. I doubt they listened to me prate about the rightness of our cause, the depravity of the Mormons, and the paradise awaiting us if we would only do our duty here on earth. What bosh! By February, I’m sure there was not a man among my flock who would not have preferred hellfire to heaven’s tepid joys.
I became acquainted with a young captain who, like me, had been stationed at a fort in Illinois. He was too dogmatic to be likable, but, to pass the time in our winter fastness, we’d talk. Concerning “Buchanan’s War,” his opinions were orthodox, unless, like me, he was afraid to reveal his disapproval. Men are never so cautious as they are in war, because, in war, they are never so ready to accuse one another of disloyalty. Liberal ideas are the product of an armchair, a glass of something warming, and the smell of roasted meat arriving from the kitchen. Privation and hunger breed discontent, as surely as lice do other lice on broken men.
The captain’s name was Ethan Gant, originally of New Jersey. He had graduated from Princeton and had studied physical geography with Arnold Guyot, whose Earth and Man, Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography, in Its Relation to the History of Mankind he had read and disliked.
“Guyot’s geography is not an inventory of earth’s disparate features but a concatenation of related ones,” he said. “This I agree with. But he sees in a landscape the revelation of God’s design. While I’m not an unbeliever, I strongly doubt that God would have expressed His secret purposes in a mountain range or on the ocean bottom. Guyot is like a Hebrew Cabalist hunting for angels among letters of an ancient alphabet. You’re a minister of God, Robert, what is your opinion?”