Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  ‘The way things are going,’ Jed said darkly, ‘they may not have any choice in the matter.’

  ‘There’s always a choice, Jed,’ Andrew said.

  ‘No,’ Jed said. ‘In the final analysis, Bo, there isn’t. If it’s a choice between killing or being killed, there’s no choice at all. Every man has to take that stand.’

  ‘No,’ Andrew argued. ‘Surely not! It takes two to make a fight.’

  ‘You sound like Pa,’ Jed said.

  ‘You think he’s wrong? You think it’s wrong to see both sides of this argument, to say that the people who want to abolish slavery have some justice on their side, while the people who oppose the way they want to go about it have, too?’

  ‘Not wrong, Bo,’ Jed growled. He was not much of a one for philosophy. Things generally had a right and a wrong to them, and that was that. You made your mind up which was which and then you got on with it.

  ‘There’s a middle ground, Jed,’ Andrew insisted. ‘There has to be.’

  ‘That’s what I mean when I say you sound like Pa,’ Jed said. ‘He thinks he can stay neutral in all this. I don’t think anyone will be able to, Bo. I think there is going to be a war between the Northern states and the slave states, and everyone will have to make his stand. Sooner or later, everyone has to.’

  ‘I know,’ Andrew said. ‘And I’m taking mine, Jed. I’m against war, and I’m for anything and anybody who’ll work to prevent it.’

  ‘Like your Quakers.’

  ‘Like my Quakers,’ Andrew said.

  ‘You’re going to do it, then. Marry her?’

  ‘We’ve already spoken of our intent at the meeting,’ Andrew replied. ‘Of course I am going to marry Ruth. Dammit, Jed, I want to marry her! I love her!’

  ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, Bo,’ Jed said. ‘I smell trouble ahead. A whole lot of trouble.’

  Two – The Story of David Strong

  December 1859

  David Strong watched them lower his father’s coffin into the grave on the knoll above Washington Farm. He was a tall, thin man, with graying hair that grew close to his head, and deep-set dark brown eyes that always held a hint of sadness. He did not try to hide his tears; he was not the kind of man who would have ever felt the need to do so. A man was likely to shed a few tears when they buried his father, even if, as David now suspected, the tears were more for what might have been than for what was. He had never been really close to his father: it always seemed to David and to his younger brother Sam that their father had squandered all the love he had on their sister, Mary. And when Mary ran away from home, it was like Big Jed forgot how to love anybody else on the face of the earth. Goodbye, Pa, David thought.

  Jedediah Morrison Strong, ‘Big Jed’ to everyone who knew him, had died at eleven o’clock on the morning of December 2 1859, at almost precisely the same moment that his grandson and namesake, Lieutenant Jedediah Strong, US Army, watched the abolitionist John Brown dropping through the scaffold trap to his death. It was a bright warm day, the kind that comes occasionally to Virginia at that time of year, so balmy that it felt like springtime. The last words Big Jed uttered were ‘damned fools!’ and every member of the family agreed that they were typical. The ‘damned fools’ to whom the old man referred were, of course, the Virginia legislature, and, in particular, that learned, patrician, eloquent and brilliant idiot who occupied the gubernatorial chair of the Old Dominion, Henry A. Wise. The reason Big Jed died damning them was because, in spite of there being no good reason for it, the Virginia legislature had determined, as punishment for attempting to lead the slaves in revolt against their masters, that old John Brown must hang. It was folly that would lead to war, Big Jed prophesied. Damned fools, all of them. And died, just like that.

  Big Jed was full of years at the time of his death, eighty going on eighty-one. Eighty-one years full of trouble and my own damned folly, he used to say, and there was truth as well as rue in the words. Big Jed was as old as the country: the war for America’s independence had still been raging when he was born in the old Cobbett house on Boston’s Salem Street.

  ‘Under a wanderin’ star,’ he used to say. ‘Footloose all my life, like my daddy was afore me.’

  And he would take down the old broken sword from the wall, lift it reverently off its blue velvet mounting, his eyes filming with memory. It was more than a keepsake of his father, Grandpa Davy. It had become a talisman as revered as the battered, leather-bound Bible that Davy Strong had brought across the seas from England nearly a century before.

  ‘This was my father’s sword,’ Big Jed would tell his children. ‘As it was his father’s afore him.’ It was an old Spanish weapon, taken in battle by the English soldier John Strong at the siege of Gibraltar. ‘April sixteenth, 1727,’ Jed told them. ‘Remember that date always, for it marks the beginning of this family’s story.’ And they would clamor for more and he would tell them about all the Strongs whose names were entered in the Bible that was always kept next to the sword.

  ‘Now you, David,’ he would tell his oldest son. ‘You’re named for my father’s grandfather, who saw the last witch burned officially in England. You, Mary?’ His eyes always softened with love when they were directed towards his daughter’s beautiful face. ‘You’re named for my Daddy’s mother, sweet Mary Wakefield, who was murdered by the black-hearted Oliver Wellbeloved.’ The children would shiver with delight. It was in Oliver Wellbeloved’s body that Davy Strong had snapped the blade of the Spanish sword. The villain’s name was as familiar a bugaboo to the Strong children as the troll in the story of the Billygoats Gruff.

  Big Jed’s daughter and two sons grew up with some of America’s greatest men as surrogate uncles. Grandpa Davy had the gift of friendship with highborn and low. When he finished building Washington Farm, named in honor of his patron and friend, the great man himself had come to visit and to pat the round-eyed children on the head. Big Jed had journeyed to the Far West with the Lewis and Clark expedition as a personal favor to his friend Tom Jefferson, who wanted old hands along to ensure the successful exploration of his Louisiana Purchase.

  ‘There’re more than a few people who’d be happy to see I’ve made a damned fool of myself in buying those lands from the French, Jed,’ Jefferson had said. ‘But I am convinced that there are great marvels out there and I want you to help my two captains to find them.’

  Big Jed always used to tell them that if it hadn’t been for his marrying Sarah Morrison, he would in all likelihood have been hauled into court with Aaron Burr and tried for treason. Burr, he said, had been flirting with the British in a plan to separate the western part of the United States and deliver it to the British for the sum of half a million dollars.

  ‘I was all afire to go in with him an’ Jimmy Wilkinson,’ Big Jed told the children. ‘But then your Mama come along and she had other ideas. And I’m here to tell you, when your Mama had her mind made up, you couldn’t hardly shift it with six kegs o’ blastin’ powder!’

  None of them had ever really known their mother. She had died when the eldest of them, David, was only seven, and little Sam hardly more than a babe. But there was a portrait of her above the mantelpiece in Big Jed’s bedroom, and you could see from the proud way she held her head, the fine eyes and the sturdy body, that she had been quite a lady.

  ‘Her Paw had some misgivin’s about us marryin’, as I recall,’ Big Jed would say. ‘Her bein’ only seventeen, and me nigh on ten years older. But Henry Morrison reckoned it needed an older man to tame her down some, an’ by Christmas! he was right!’

  Sarah was a tall, raw-boned girl with a temper that had come intact across the Atlantic from her family’s native heath in Wicklow. She was a good head taller than her husband, who had the same compact, stocky build as his father. The name ‘Big Jed’ only came after the birth of David’s son, who they called ‘Little Jed’ to differentiate between them. He was never a big man, and Sarah, who was touchy about her height anyway, was even touchier about hi
s, as Amos Clinton found out at Jed and Sarah’s wedding. He made some kind of remark about ‘the long and short of it’ and turned around to find himself facing Sarah Morrison, fresh from the altar, arms akimbo.

  ‘Amos Clinton,’ she said, without apparent anger, ‘you are a mean-mouthed man.’ She handed her bouquet of lilies to one of her bridesmaids and then, to the astonished delight of everyone present, laid Amos Clinton out with a blow of her clenched fist. Then she turned back to her awestruck bridegroom and smiled her deceptively sweet smile.

  ‘And that can serve as notice to you, Jedediah Strong!’ she said. ‘I’ll take hard words from no man!’

  Their marriage, Big Jed always said, was like the sea. When it was calm, it was beautiful. But when there were storms, there was no worse place on earth to be. And storms there were when Jed announced that he was going south with Burr and Wilkinson.

  ‘Tom Jefferson don’t trust that man!’ Sarah shouted at the peak of their argument. ‘And if Tom Jefferson don’t trust a man, then that man isn’t worth what cats lick off their backsides!’

  ‘Hell, woman!’ Jed stormed back. ‘That’s politics! It ain’t got anythin’ to do with trustin’ or not trustin’!’

  ‘Aaron Burr is trouble, Jedediah!’ Sarah said. ‘She never called him anything else in all the years they were married.’

  ‘And if you follow his star, you’ll end up ruined!’

  ‘Well, as to that, who knows?’ Jed argued. ‘Might be I’d come back with a fortune. Burr’s offered me twenty thousand acres if I want it.’

  ‘Twenty thousand acres of what, addlepate?’ she snorted. ‘Swamp? Desert? What then? You don’t even know where’s he’s a-goin’ to.’

  ‘Woman, you don’t understand business matters,’ Jed said exasperatedly. ‘You just leave it to me to know what’s best.’

  ‘It’ll be a fine day raining fishes when I leave it to you to know what’s best, Jedediah Strong!’ she retorted. ‘And who’s to manage this farm while you’re off gallivantin’ God knows where?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jed said. ‘Broken both your arms and legs, have you?’

  ‘I’ll be doing other things, dearest heart,’ Sarah said, honeyed venom in her tone. ‘Thanks to you.’

  ‘What other things?’ he snapped. ‘What damned nonsense are you talkin’ now?’

  She smiled like a cat and patted her belly; For a long, long moment, Jed just looked into her smiling eyes. Then his anger disappeared like wind-blown smoke. He got up out of his chair and swept her up in his arms. ‘It’s true?’ he said softly.

  ‘Your son will be born in April,’ she said and kissed him. Jedediah put his hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes, smiling, smiling. ‘You’re really something, you are,’ he said.

  ‘Come upstairs,’ she grinned. ‘And you’ll find out just how much.’

  She was right about Burr. He was arrested the following February, barely two months before little David was born, and tried the following September for treason. He was a damned scoundrel, Aaron Burr was, Big Jed told the children, but I wasn’t all that much of a saint, either.

  And they would beg to hear more stories, because he was a storyteller born. He could make you see the faces of the people he told you about and conjure up the darknesses of the great forests, the sunlight sparkling on the waters of the mighty rivers. The long winter nights were the best time for stories as all gathered around the fire. It was from Big Jed they had learned about Grandpa Davy and the broken sword, and about Andrew Brennan and the man with the strange name ‘Half-hanged’ Bowman, who had cheated the London hangman and died in the cause of American freedom.

  From the time of David’s birth, Jedediah Morrison Strong wandered no more. ‘Took me a pretty damned long time to settle down,’ he said. ‘But by Christmas, when the time come, I done her right!’

  The end of his wandering marked the beginning of his dynasty. After David came Selina, then William, Thomas, Mary, Henry and Samuel, little Sam who was only five months old when Sarah Morrison Strong died of the ‘wasting sickness’ that had come upon her. The big, raw-boned girl whom Jedediah had married weighed scarcely more than eighty pounds when they lowered her into her grave on the grassy knoll overlooking the house.

  And now they were laying Big Jed alongside her, David Strong thought, remembering how he had stood beside his mother’s grave that windy March day. You didn’t really understand what death was when you were eight years old. The wasted little creature in the bed upstairs seemed to him to have no connection with the sturdy, smiling woman who had been his mother. It was as if that mother had gone away somewhere, and left in her place a strange, feeble, wan invalid whose burial he could witness without tears. Strange that now, over forty years later, he should find himself crying for her as if it were she and not his father who was being laid to rest.

  ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live,’ he heard the minister saying. He was reading from the big Bible with the worn leather cover which the grandfather after whom David had been named had brought to America in 1775. He had often thumbed through it and knew every name on the flyleaves by heart, every member of the Strong family, all the way back to the beginnings.

  The first entry had now almost faded entirely but he knew the words as a priest did his catechism. ‘To David Strong on his birth, from his father’s father, Ezekiel Strong, in this year of grace’, with looping T’s where the S’s should be.

  He looked around. There were many distinguished faces among the mourners, for Big Jed had died full of years and honors. Unable to attend personally, President Buchanan had sent his vice-president, John Breckinridge, to deputize for him. John Floyd, Breckinridge’s Cabinet colleague who was secretary of war, had come over from Abingdon. The two men stood close together, their faces sober. Next to Floyd stood another senator, Jefferson Davis, a tall, handsome man whom David still remembered fondly mooning around the place after his sister, Mary, when Sam had brought Jeff home for a visit from West Point.

  How very many of the men Big Jed had known had preceded him to the grave, he thought. Among his circle of friends had been three presidents of the United States. Washington Farm had sheltered them all; among the first to visit it on its completion had been the one after whom it had been named. Grandpa Davy and his wife Martha had built the solid, square house on to which all the rambling extensions of later years had been grafted. At the time of his death in 1826 Davy Strong had been renowned as one of the best bloodstock-breeders in Virginia. The lovely house with its delicate Georgian lines became a hub from which radiated servants’ cottages and the buildings of the stud: eighty-five loose boxes, six stallion boxes, twelve foaling boxes, sitting-up rooms, grooming stables, a covering yard, a trotting track, and a great, gloomy, dust-filled Dutch barn for fodder. There were no slaves: all the servants and field hands on Washington Farm were freed men.

  Up on the knoll overlooking the house, Grandpa Davy set aside a plot of land, perhaps an acre in all, to serve as the family cemetery. The first grave in it was dug for his old friend Andrew Brennan, whose body he located in a forgotten graveyard in Carolina and brought back to Virginia. The grave lay on the western edge of the knoll, looking west towards the Blue Ridge Mountains. Over it stood a simple stone on which were carved Brennan’s name and the date of his death, together with the words Old David had thought fitting: Greater love hath no man than this.

  It was here that David Strong lingered after the funeral was over and the mourners had all returned to the house. He came here often. It was as if the past held him in safe arms, as if all those who had gone before were with him, watching benignly as he strove to find solutions to the problems that lay before him. The thing was, he told himself – knowing it was just an excuse to stay where he was – they’d be talking politics up at the house, and politics was something that right now he was getting more of than he considered was his share. There were hotheads everywhere these days, with their tal
k of free soil and slavery, who pounded fists on palms and said emphatically that war between the states was becoming inevitable. To go to war over slavery!

  That slaves were an essential element of the South’s economy, particularly in the cotton-growing area, was a fact no sensible man argued against. He might complain mildly, and sometimes did, that a man who owned two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of slaves paid no tax on that ‘property’, while a man who owned land to the same value did. But only mildly. And certainly not to bolster his arguments against slavery, as did his neighbor, Edward Maxwell. Of course, Maxwell was obsessed with the abolition of slavery. Obsessed was the only word for it, David thought. Maxwell was the kind of hothead – and there were too damned many of them altogether for his liking – who would set fire to his own mother if he thought it would advance the cause of abolition. The Maxwell house was draped with black banners, the father in ‘mourning’ to mark the hanging of John Brown. Maxwell’s two sons, Paul and David, were as bigoted as their father, perhaps worse. They wanted war against the slave states the way a babe wants mother’s milk. Only a day after his arrival on furlough, young Jed had got into a furious argument with Paul Maxwell because Jed had been present at the hanging. That it was his duty as a soldier to go where he was sent lent no justification to it in Paul Maxwell’s eyes. Fortunately Andrew had interceded before it got out of hand. Harsh words had been spoken all the same; words that would not readily be forgotten by either the Maxwell boys or David’s sons.

  The folly of it angered David. The fact that he, personally, found the concept of owning another human being abhorrent, did not convince him that he ought immediately to take arms against someone who did not. There were plenty of men who would though. Maxwell was just such a one. You could not reason with zealots: they heard no voices but their own.

  He walked away from his father’s grave, up to the crest where Grandpa Davy was buried alongside his wife Martha and his friend, Andrew Brennan. I wonder what they think of all this? he thought. David was convinced of their constant presence, and never more than when he was in this place alone. Life, he felt, was but one of many existences, and there were many lives beyond this life of which mere men knew nothing. After all, he reasoned, if life was such a series of surprises, why shouldn’t death be, too? He stopped beside the slim marble marker beneath the oak which crowned the knoll.