Of course, the hatred of these women for those of mixed race was extreme, and so whenever one was publicly whipped, and the whole population of the plantation was called out to witness it, there was a noticeable absence of the remorse and recoiling that a little girl might have expected from others. This was particularly true during Elizabeth’s first visit to the plantation, when one of the victims—a light-skinned field worker whom the overseer had deemed “too slow”—was brought to an open area at the back of the house and forced to lie on the ground. It was the pretty one—the same one who had been smiling at little Elizabeth from around the porch corners all week—and she could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. The overseer had forced her down and pulled her dress up to her neck, revealing the shocking nakedness of the young woman’s amber stomach and thighs.
“Serves her right,” Elizabeth heard one of the cousins remark. “Always nosing about instead of working, as she should be.”
Elizabeth hid behind her father while it happened, though she could not help but peek around his coattails as the girl screamed in agony. How quickly the pretty face on the ground transformed … how monstrous and ghastly the distortion that Elizabeth would forever see. But as the whip lurched and cracked, and welts began to form on the girl’s thighs, Elizabeth experienced a kind of unfamiliar pleasure, which even as an adult she would never quite fathom. It was not pleasure at the poor girl’s suffering, but at the idea that someone else was experiencing the suffering. That someone else’s body—not hers—had become the recipient of so much degradation. One might have described this as pure relief, but no, there was a misplaced sense of pleasure in it—the kind of pleasure a small child feels when a brother or sister receives a punishment instead. That girl on the ground might well have been someone else’s sister, or Elizabeth’s cousin, for all Elizabeth knew. Amongst the children who ran about and played on the plantation, there was no real awareness of who was related and who wasn’t.
Elizabeth never forgot what she saw that day, nor her father’s question to his cousin when the whipping was over:
“Was it necessary to punish this young woman so severely?”
“Oh yes,” came the reply. “If I hadn’t she would have done the same thing again tomorrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed her example. The niggers would never do any work at all if they weren’t afraid of being whipped.”
Later that afternoon, before the mosquitoes had started their buzzing, the women refrained from referring to the incident—at least directly. There was more talk of the harvest, and of the younger Beauregards, who had gone off to school in New York. And there was even the requisite acknowledgement of “the insubordination of the niggers,” which seemed to bring an edge of hostility to nearly every woman present. Only later, when she was older and had acquired more education, would Elizabeth realize that overt hatred of the “mulattoes” was something that southern gentility did not quite condone. Rather, her cousins and all of their kind would need to work out their despisal in a complexity of behaviors and verbal codes. Elizabeth’s mother had certainly taken this truth back to Philadelphia, and had all but announced it to Elizabeth’s father on the way home. “Their men seem to think themselves models of husbands and fathers,” she had said. “But in reality, they live all in one house with their wives and their concubines.”
And so for Elizabeth to listen to Elena Cragin or Lucretia Patterson speak of politics or ghosts, even in their justified passion, always seemed something of an exercise in patience. For she understood, in ways much deeper than they, that former peddlers of human flesh had so much more to fear should their unknown offspring decide to reveal themselves to the world. If those ghosts chose to shatter the comfort and silence of the grave, what avenue of denial would remain available for the guilty?
“I’ve heard, too,” Elena Cragin said, “that the negroes have started appearing in the spirit photographs.”
“And there will be more, you can be sure,” Constance said, still somewhat discomfited, “if what you’re telling me about the goings-on down south continues unabated and unpunished.”
Elizabeth grew even more anxious than she had been all evening. The conversation was taking an unwelcome turn, and she could not wait to get these people out of her house.
“James has said time and again,” she offered, “that nothing will really change down there unless the entire society is destroyed. We’ve done that militarily, but the cultural vestiges are alive as ever.”
“They must embrace their wrongs,” Lucretia Patterson declared. “It’s as Mr. Dovehouse was saying earlier. They’ve not been held accountable by the government, and so the violence continues to erupt.”
“If what you say is true though,” Constance said, “it’s a wonder to me that the women of the South can abide such barbarism.”
Constance’s comment seemed to encapsulate all that had gone wrong after the war.
“And just who do you think is sewing the hoods?” Elizabeth said.
The women all fell silent at this.
XIV
IN THE DINING room, the men sipped their brandy.
“It seemed a reasonable investment,” John Merriwhether was proclaiming. “Indeed, one I couldn’t in good conscience refuse.”
“And you were right not to refuse it,” Dovehouse added in support. “I think your investment in Mississippi land entirely wise. What the South needs most right now is northern capital—not negro voters and legislators.”
“We have given them a voice!” Senator Cragin erupted.
“No,” Dovehouse replied, “what you’ve given them is the hopeless idea of a voice that those damned rebels are determined to suppress—at any cost.”
With the women out of the room, Dovehouse’s restraint had died away. The five men faced one another like reluctant leaders at a negotiating table: Merriwhether and Dovehouse on one side, Senators Patterson and Cragin on the other, and Garrett in the chair at the head of the table, though his position was far from the middle.
“It is true,” Senator Patterson said, “that northern capital is of the utmost importance in the South, but mainly insofar as it is in support of the negro, and not at his expense.”
Garrett tensed, for he knew the storm that was about to follow.
“Pshaw!” Dovehouse said. “Policies of outright land grants for the negroes would be at the expense of no one but legitimate property owners. Mind you, I do not apologize for the rebels, and would have seen them all hung if anything else, but I tell you—the property rights of citizens in this country must be respected.”
And he three times struck the surface of the table, emphasizing the importance of his last words.
“White citizens,” Senator Cragin added testily.
“Propertied citizens,” Dovehouse corrected. “If the negroes do not own property—yet—there is precious little the federal government should be doing about that. I am a citizen of this country and I am a man of property. The idea of giving free land to the negroes or anyone else insults the very principles upon which this nation was founded!”
During the past week or so, the intensity of the Moody situation had all but muted discussions of politics between Garrett and his old friend. But here was the same debate rearing its ugly head again—one of many that had put a strain on Garrett’s friendship with Dovehouse in recent years. Yes, the negroes were free, Dovehouse liked to say, and needed a dependable means to earn their living. But let them work to earn that means, and learn the good habits of working men.
“It is certainly true,” John Merriwhether continued in his own defense, “that no race of men has ever acquired a right to the soil with more vigorous exertion than the southern negroes. But I agree with Dovehouse—to allow them to receive land so easily would only encourage them in their idleness and unthrifty habits. For their own good, the intervention of northern investment will help them to learn that, like everyone else, they must pay for what they get.”
&
nbsp; “And I suppose you will be amenable to reselling this wonderful land to the negroes?” Cragin said. “At the appropriate time, eh? And at a price they can afford?”
“As long as the price is a fair one,” Merriwhether said.
“Which is as it should be,” Dovehouse added.
Senator Cragin slammed the table.
“But the freedmen have no capital! And never will, without what you insist on calling ‘favors.’ We’ve released four million persons from bondage, and have yet to settle on a practical plan for their welfare. How can you expect the freedmen to establish true independence when we give them nothing to start with?”
“Did our forefathers ‘start with’ something when they came here?” Dovehouse responded. “Were there patrons waiting for them on the shores of Massachusetts and Virginia, with gifts of land and money aplenty? No, I tell you—no! There were red-skinned savages and wild beasts—a wilderness of nothing out of which they eventually formed a civilization. And so it is the same for us all. Good men like Merriwhether here are investing in the South, helping to rebuild its economy, which in turn will help rebuild this nation. And when you get down to it, Cragin, we need to keep the cotton flowing. There is simply no getting around that.”
“True,” Senator Cragin admitted, “but there are more equitable ways of ensuring the cotton supply.”
“But the negroes don’t want to grow it!” Dovehouse fumed. “They prefer sowing corn and potatoes, and anything else that’s not cotton. The idea! Turn the land over to the negroes, my friend, and the riches of the most fertile soil in the country will be squandered away before our very eyes.”
At this, Senator Patterson leaned forward into the argument. Like Garrett, he was a man of carefully measured words.
“You say that free negro labor under good management can be made a source of profit for the employer. That is all well and good, and yes—the cotton is not to be overlooked. But by God, Dovehouse—they are hiring former overseers to supervise the blacks on their former plantations! They care nothing for how much flesh they work off the negro provided that it’s converted into a good cash crop!”
“The old systems must be eradicated,” Cragin said. “If they aren’t, our cause—and the entire war—will have been for nothing.”
“I have always been of the firm belief,” Dovehouse said, “that abolition, and in turn the conversion of the South into a land of free enterprise, was of the utmost necessity with regard to the destiny of this nation. But what I cannot—nay, what I will not—ever condone, is the privileging of one group of citizens over another.”
Dovehouse looked at Garrett. He would never insult his friend directly.
“It was madness for the party to try to legislate free land for the negroes.”
“That is much more than we have ever done for white men,” Merri-whether added.
“White men have never been in chains,” Garrett said.
They were the first words that Garrett had spoken since dinner, and his deep voice resounded like the groan of an iron bell. Like Elizabeth, he had allowed other preoccupations to claim his thoughts that evening, but the conversation, he could now tell, was on the verge of spinning out of control. He had heard these arguments time and time again. “Bringing loyal Northern men into harmonious terms with the owners of the soil,” so the party line went, “would create perfect partnerships through which the application of negro labor would guarantee the peaceful pursuit of agriculture.” The ingredients necessary for the economic recovery of the South—and the nation—were already within reach. Men of industry simply needed to make sure that the freedmen continued to work the land.
The room was quiet, the walls and guests awaiting Garrett’s next words.
“Property,” Garrett finally said. “The interests of sacred property … are combining, both openly and secretly, to keep the negro in a practical state of bondage. These interests—of which Merriwhether here has recently joined the ranks—pay the negro reluctantly, break his labor contracts, attempt to govern him by pistol and whip, hinder his education, destroy his schoolhouses, and in several states kill him and his representatives, leaving many others maimed for the rest of their lives. Do you know that they wanted to imprison a man for five years for stealing a pig? Yes, gentlemen—five years. Starve the man to death, and make sure that his family remains starving, and then imprison him for five years when he tries to steal his supper. Imprison him so that hundreds more already on the chain gang stand ready to welcome him … and all because he refuses to lie down like a dog and grow your cotton!”
And here Garrett paused to survey his audience—these gentlemen who had come to dine in his home.
“These landless, indigent negroes are being imprisoned, murdered, and mutilated by the thousands. And nothing—nothing—can reach and protect them but the vigorous, united arm of the government.”
A moment of silence followed the senator’s oration. Ah, Senators Cragin and Patterson thought … that was the James B. Garrett they knew, the Garrett who had come to power in the early fifties, and who had grown famous for condemning the South’s attempts to block freedom in the territories. That Garrett—the vicious, unrelenting, abolitionist Garrett—had, in a way, been born during the crisis in Kansas. It was then that his speeches had brought him to the center of the national stage, and had earned him the respect of even the most radical abolitionists. “The House of Bondage stands erect,” the young senator had declared, “clanking its chains on the open land of this free territory. Not in any common lust for power has this uncommon tragedy had its origin. The crime against Kansas is the rape of a virgin Territory … compelling the South into the hateful embrace of its harlot!”
No one could phrase it like Garrett—not even Thaddeus Stevens in the House. It wasn’t for nothing that Longfellow, hearing him in those early days, had described him as “a cannoneer, ramming down cartridges.” Senators Cragin and Patterson, along with the rest of the radical leadership, had been admiring Senator Garrett for close to twenty years. As they sat there in his dining room, seduced by his poignant treatise, they understood that the old codger had no intentions of slowing down.
But Garrett’s triumphs—political and otherwise—had not been without their costs. Dovehouse for one had grown increasingly suspicious of his friend’s reason, privately, and sometimes even publicly, observing that Garrett had “simply gone too far.” Abolition and the progress of free labor were one thing; civil rights for the blacks quite another. And so when Johnson, in his State of the Union Address a few years earlier, had professed that the negroes “had shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism whenever left to their own devices,” Dovehouse, almost in retaliation for his friend’s fanaticism, had openly praised the president’s speech. It was growing more and more useless, Dovehouse thought, to continue this conversation with the radicals, for Garrett and his cronies had become incurably biased against investors from the North. Of course, Dovehouse could have transformed the entire conversation that evening, being the only one at the table who remembered Garrett’s political ghosts. But now was not the time to resurrect such things, so Dovehouse refrained from mentioning them.
THE HOUSE QUIETLY groaned, relieved that the guests had gone, as Elizabeth lay still beneath her bedclothes, and Garrett huffed and tossed at her side.
“The audacity,” Garrett said. “Men like Merriwhether should know better. It is all for the damned profit. Dovehouse I understand, but Merriwhether …”
She did not even hear the end of his sentence. She could not stand the sound of his voice.
Elizabeth studied the contours of the ceiling—the many smiles and frowns in the plaster. She half listened to her husband as he raged on beside her. His passion would eventually subside.
“I have given over my entire life to this cause,” he was saying, “and Merriwhether knows that—knows better than almost anyone else! Of course, he’s not trying to work against me directly, but his participation in the scheme undermines e
verything I’m trying to do. The more profit they make, the less anyone will ever entertain the idea of giving any land to the negroes.”
He was distracted. It was typical. He wasn’t even thinking about her.
“Yes, James,” Elizabeth said tiredly, “I know.”
“A damned hypocrite,” Garrett said. “Says he’s for one thing, and does the other. The hypocrisy of it is what riles me most, Elizabeth. We need willing, honest men behind the effort, not opportunists who will change course for an extra dime. North as well as South are conspiring against the negro. The North is infected with hypocrisy.”
She turned her gaze from the ceiling and considered her husband. There was his angry profile silhouetted against the windowpanes. Her disgust with him in that moment erased the renowned handsomeness observed by others. He of all people … talking of hypocrisy in their bed.
“The people’s belief in you remains firm,” she said. “No one will ever be able to accuse you of anything less than devotion.”
XV
THE FADING MOON showered Joseph and Moody as they fled through the countryside, the night itself having become a ceaseless observer. Was the assassin still tracking them quietly from somewhere in the darkness, or had he abandoned his quarry for now? All around Joseph and Moody, a suspicious silence lurked, as if the trees were conspiring to hide something.
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