by John Jakes
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I,——, do solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the constitution of the United States and the Union of the states thereunder, and that I will in like manner abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves. So help me God.
Oath required of all Confederates
seeking presidential pardon, 1865
3
“I MUST TAKE THIS oath?” Cooper Main asked. He’d ridden all the way to Columbia to see about the matter, and suddenly had doubts.
“If you want a pardon,” said lawyer Trezevant, from the other side of the flimsy table serving as a desk. His regular offices had burned in the great fire of February 17, so he’d rented an upstairs room at Reverdy Bird’s Mortuary on the east side of town, which the flames had spared. Mr. Bird had converted his main parlor to a shop selling cork feet, wooden limbs, and glass eyes to maimed veterans. A buzz of voices indicated good business this morning.
Cooper stared at the handwritten oath. He was lanky man and had a lot of gray in his untrimmed hair, though he was only forty-five. The scarcity of food had reduced him to gauntness. Workdays lasting sixteen hours had put fatigue shadows under his deep-set brown eyes. He was laboring to rebuild the warehouses, the docks, and the trade of his Carolina Shipping Company in Charleston.
“See here, I understand your resentment,” Trezevant said. “But if General Lee can humble himself and apply, as he did in Richmond last week, you can, too.”
“A pardon implies wrongdoing. I did nothing wrong.”
“I agree, Cooper. Unfortunately, the federal government does not. If you want to rebuild your business, you have to free yourself of the onus of having served the Confederate Navy Department.” Cooper glowered. Trezevant continued. “I went to Washington personally, and, within limits, I trust this pardon broker, even though he’s a lawyer, and a Yankee on top of it.” The bitter humor was lost. “His name is Jasper Dills. He’s greedy, so I know he’ll get your application to the clerk of pardons, and to Mr. Johnson’s desk, ahead of many others.”
“For how much?”
“Two hundred dollars, U.S., or the equivalent in sterling. My fee is fifty dollars.”
Cooper thought a while.
“All right, give me the papers.”
They talked for another half hour. Trezevant was full of Washington gossip. He said Johnson planned to appoint a provisional governor in South Carolina. The governor would call a constitutional convention and reconvene the state legislature as it was constituted before Sumter fell. Johnson’s choice was not unexpected. It was Judge Benjamin Franklin Perry, of Greenville, an avowed Unionist before the war. Like Lee, Perry had proclaimed his loyalty to his state, despite his hatred of secession, saying: “You are all going to the devil—and I will go with you.”
“The legislature will have to fulfill Mr. Johnson’s requirements for readmission,” Trezevant said. “Officially abolish slavery, for example.” A sly expression alerted Cooper to something new. “At the same time, the legislature may be able to, ah, regulate the nigras so that we’ll have a labor force again, instead of a shiftless rabble.”
“Regulate them how?”
“By means of—let’s call it a code of behavior. I’m told Mississippi is thinking of the same thing.”
“Would such a code apply to whites, too?”
“Freedmen only.”
Cooper recognized danger in such a provocative step but the morality of it didn’t concern him. The end of the war had brought him, his family, and his state a full measure of humiliation and ruin. He no longer cared about the condition of the people responsible—the people the war had set free.
By noon, Cooper’s slow old horse was plodding southeast on the homeward journey. The route carried him back through central Columbia. He could hardly stand the sight. Nearly one hundred and twenty blocks had been burned down. The smell of charred wood still lay heavy in the air of the hot June day.
The dirt streets were littered with trash and broken furniture. A wagon belonging to the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands dispensed packets of rice and flour to a large crowd, mostly Negro. Other blacks crowded the few stretches of wooden sidewalk still in place. Cooper saw military uniforms and some civilian gentlemen, but well-dressed white women were notably absent. It was the same everywhere. Such women stayed indoors, because they hated the soldiers and feared the freed Negroes. Cooper’s wife, Judith, was an exception, which irritated him.
General Sherman had destroyed the wooden bridge spanning the Congaree River. Only the stone abutments remained, standing in the stream like smoke-stained gravestones. The slow crossing on the ferry barge gave Cooper an excellent view of one of the few buildings the fire had spared, the unfinished statehouse near the east shore. In one granite wall, like periods on paper, three Union cannonballs testified to Sherman’s fury.
The sight of them raised Cooper’s anger. So did the burned district, which he reached soon after leaving the ferry. He rode along the edge of a lane of scorched earth three-quarters of a mile wide. Here, between flaming pines, Kilpatrick’s cavalry had pillaged, leaving a black waste marked by lonely chimneys—Sherman’s Sentinels, all that remained of homes in the path of the barbaric march.
He stayed the night at a seedy inn outside the city. In the taproom he avoided conversation but listened closely to the impoverished yeomen drinking around him. To hear them, you’d think the South had won, or at least was able to continue fighting for its cause.
Next morning, he rode on, through heat and haze promising another fierce summer in the Low Country. He traveled on dirt roads left unrepaired after Union supply trains tore them up. A farmer would need a strong new wagon to get through the eight-inch ruts in the sandy soil and reach market with his crop—if he had a crop. Probably the farmer couldn’t find a new wagon to buy, or the money for it, either. Cooper seethed.
Riding on toward Charleston and the coast, he crossed a roadbed; all the rails were gone and only a few ties were left. He met no white people, though twice he saw bands of Negroes moving through fields. Just past the hamlet of Chicora, on his way to the Cooper River, he came upon a dozen black men and women gathering wild herbs at the roadside. He reached into the pocket of his old coat and took hold of the little pocket pistol he’d bought for the trip.
The blacks watched Cooper approach. One of the women wore a red velvet dress and an oval cameo pin, probably, Cooper thought, stolen from a white mistress. The rest were raggedy. Cooper sweated and clutched the hidden pistol, but they let him ride through.
A big man with a red bandanna tied into a cap stepped into the road behind him. “You ain’t the boss ’round here any more, Captain.”
Cooper turned and glared. “Who the hell said I was? Why don’t you get to work and do something useful?”
“Don’t have to work,” said the woman in red velvet. “You can’t force us and you can’t whip us. Not no more. We’re free.”
“Free to squander your lives in sloth. Free to forget your friends.”
“Friends? The likes of you, who kept us locked up?” The bandanna man snickered. “Ride on, Captain, ’fore we drag you off that nag and give you the kind of hidin’ we used to get.”
Cooper’s jaw clenched. He pulled out the pocket pistol and pointed it. The woman in velvet screamed and dived into the ditch. The others scattered, except for the bandanna man, who strode toward Cooper’s horse. Suddenly, good sense prevailed; Cooper booted the nag and got out of there.
He didn’t stop shaking for almost ten minutes. Trezevant was right. The legislature must do something to regularize the behavior of the freedmen. Liberty had become anarchy. And without hands to labor in the heat and damp, South Carolina would slip from critical illness to death.
Later, when he calmed down, he began to consider the work to be done at the shipping
company. Fortunately, he didn’t have the extra burden of worrying about Mont Royal. Decency and propriety had prompted him to make his arrangement with Orry’s widow, and she now bore all the responsibility for the plantation to which he held title. Madeline was of mixed blood, and everyone knew it, because Ashton had blurted it to the world. But no one made anything of her ancestry. Nor would they so long as she behaved like a proper white woman.
Melancholy visions of his younger sisters diverted him from thoughts of work. He saw Brett, married to that Yankee, Billy Hazard, and bound for California, according to her last letter. He saw Ashton, who’d involved herself in some grotesque plot to unseat Davis’s government and replace it with a crowd of hotspurs. She’d disappeared into the West, and he suspected she was dead. He couldn’t summon much sorrow over it, and he didn’t feel guilty. Ashton was a tormented girl, with all the personal difficulties that seemed to afflict women of great beauty and great ambition. Her morals had always been despicable.
The sun dropped down toward the sand hills behind him, and he began to wind through glinting salt marshes, close to home. How he loved South Carolina, and especially the Low Country. His son’s tragic death had transformed him to a loyalist, although he still perceived himself to be a moderate on every issue but one: the inherent superiority of the white race and its fitness to govern society. Cooper was at this moment about ten minutes away from an encounter with a man who carried Southern loyalty far beyond anything he ever imagined.
His name was Desmond LaMotte. He was a great scarecrow of a man, with outlandishly long legs, which hung almost to the ground as he rode his mule through the marshes near the Cooper River. His arms were equivalently long. He had curly carrot-colored hair with a startling streak of white running back from his forehead; the war had given him that. He wore a neat imperial the color of his hair.
He came from the old Huguenot stock that dominated the state’s town and plantation aristocracy. His late mother was a Huger, a Huguenot name pronounced You-gee. The war had cut down most of the young men in both families.
Des was a native Charlestonian, born in 1834. By the time he was fifteen he’d reached his adult height of six feet four inches. His hands measured ten inches from the tip of the little finger to the tip of the thumb when the fingers were spread. His feet measured thirteen inches from heel to big toe. So naturally, like any strong-willed, contrary, and defiant young man with those physical characteristics, he decided to become a dancing master.
People scoffed. But he was determined, and he made a success of it. It was an old and honorable profession, particularly in the South. Up among the hypocrites of New England, preachers always railed against mixed dancing, along with dancing in taverns, Maypole dancing (it smacked of pagan ritual), or any dancing with food and drink nearby. Southerners had a more enlightened view, because of their higher culture, their spiritual kinship with the English gentry, and their economic system; slavery gave them the leisure time for learning how to dance. Both Washington and Jefferson—great men; great Southerners, in Des’s view—had been partial to dancing.
Early in life, whether riding or thrusting with a foil or idly tossing a horseshoe with some of the children of Charleston’s free Negro population, Des LaMotte demonstrated an agility unusual in any boy, and remarkable in someone growing so large so quickly. His parents recognized his ability, and because they believed in the benefits of dance instruction for young gentlemen, they started his lessons at age eleven. Des never forgot the first stern words of his own dancing master. He’d committed them to memory and later used them with his own pupils:
The dancing school is not a place of amusement, but a place of education. And the end of a good education is not that you become accomplished dancers, but that you become good sons and daughters, good husbands and wives, good citizens and good Christians.
In the five years preceding the war, well and happily married to Miss Sally Sue Means, of Charleston, Des had established a school in rooms on King Street, and developed a thriving trade among the Low Country plantations, through which he made a circuit three times annually, always advertising in local papers in advance of his visit. He never lacked for pupils. He taught a little fencing to the boys, but mostly he taught dances: the traditional quadrilles and Yorks and reels, with the dancers in a set or a line that would not compromise their morals through too much physical contact. He also taught the newer, more daring importations from Europe, the waltz and polka, closed dances with the couples facing one another in what some considered a dangerous intimacy. An Episcopal divine in Charleston had preached against “the abomination of permitting a man who is neither your fiancé nor your husband to encircle you with his arms and slightly press the contour of your waist.” Des laughed at that. He considered all dancing moral, because he considered himself, and every one of his pupils, the same.
The five years in which he taught from the standard text, Rambeau’s Dancing Master—his worn copy was in his saddlebag this moment—were magical ones. Despite the abolitionists and the threat of war, he presided at opulent balls and plantation assemblies, watching with delight as attractive white men and women danced by candlelight from seven at night until three or four in the morning, hardly out of breath. It was all capped by the glorious winter social season in Charleston, and the grand ball of the prestigious St. Cecilia Society.
Des’s knowledge of dancing was wide and eclectic. He had seen frontier plank dancing, in which two men jigged on a board between barrels until one fell off. On plantations he’d observed slave dancing, rooted in Africa, consisting of elaborate heel-and-toe steps done to the beat of clappers made of animal bone or blacksmith’s rasps scraped together. Generally, the planters prohibited drums among their slaves, deeming them a means of transmitting secret messages about rebellions or arson plots.
He had dreamed long hours over an engraved portrait of Thomas D. Rice, the great white dancer who’d enthralled audiences early in the century with his blackface character Jim Crow. From Carolinians who’d traveled in the North, he’d heard descriptions of the Shaking Quakers, notorious nigger lovers whose dances gave form to religious doctrine. A single slow-moving file of dancers, each placing one careful foot ahead of the other, represented the narrow path to salvation; three or more concentric rings of dancers turning in alternate directions were the wheel-within-a-wheel, the Shaker vision of the cosmos. Des knew the whole universe of American dance, though to those who paid him he admitted to liking only those kinds of dancing that he taught.
His universe was shattered with the first cannon fire on Fort Sumter. He mustered at once with the Palmetto Rifles, a unit organized by his best friend, Captain Ferris Brixham. Out of the original eighty men, only three were left in April of this year, when General Joe Johnston surrendered the Confederacy’s last field army at Durham Station, North Carolina. The night before the surrender, a beastly yankee sergeant and four of his men caught Des and Ferris foraging for food and beat them unconscious. Des survived; Ferris died in his arms an hour after officers announced the surrender. Ferris left a wife and five young children.
Embittered, Des trudged back to Charleston, where an eighty-five-year-old uncle told him Sally Sue had died in January of pneumonia and complications of malnutrition. As if that wasn’t enough, throughout the war the whole LaMotte family had been shamed by members of another family in the Ashley River district. It was more than Des could bear. His mind had turned white. There was a month of which he remembered nothing. Aging relatives had cared for him.
Now he rode his mule through the marshes, looking for plantation clients from the past or people who could afford lessons for their children. He’d found neither. Behind him, barefoot, walked his fifty-year-old servant, an arthritic black called Juba; it was a slave name meaning musician. After his return home, Des had signed Juba to a lifetime contract of personal service. Juba was frightened by the new freedom bestowed by the legendary Linkum. He readily made his mark on the paper he couldn’t read.
&
nbsp; Juba walked in the sunshine with one hand resting on the hindquarters of the mule ridden by a man with only two ambitions: to practice again the profession he loved in a world the Yankees had made unfit for it, and to extract retribution from any of those who had contributed to his misery and that of his family and his homeland.
This was the man who confronted Cooper Main.
A yellow-pine plank thirty inches wide lay across the low spot in the salt marsh, a place otherwise impassable. Cooper reached the inland end of the plank a step or two before the ungainly fellow on the mule reached the other end with his mournful Negro.
On a dry hillock twenty feet from the crossing, an alligator lay sunning. They were common in the coastal marshes. This one was mature: twelve feet long, probably five hundred pounds. Disturbed by the interlopers, it slid into the water and submerged. Only its unhooded eyes, above the water, showed its slow movement toward the plank. Sometimes ’gators were dangerous if too hungry, or if they perceived a man or an animal as a threat.
Cooper noticed the ’gator. Although he’d seen them since he was small, they terrified him. Nightmares of their tooth-lined jaws still tormented him occasionally. He shivered as he watched the eyes glide closer. Abruptly, the eyes submerged, and the alligator swam away.
Cooper thought the young man with the imperial was familiar, but couldn’t place him. He heard him say, from the other end of the plank, “Give way.”
Hot and irritable, Cooper began, “I see no reason—”
“I say again, sir, give way.”
“No, sir. You’re impertinent and presumptuous, and I don’t know you.”
“But I know you, sir.” The young man’s glance conveyed suppressed rage, yet he spoke in a conversational, even pleasant, way. The contradiction set Cooper’s nerves to twitching.
“You’re Mr. Cooper Main, from Charleston. The Carolina Shipping Company. Mont Royal Plantation. Desmond LaMotte, sir.”