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THE COPPERHEAD
BY HAROLD FREDERIC.
IN THE VALLEY.
Illustrated by Howard Pyle $1.50
THE LAWTON GIRL.
12mo, paper, 50 cents; cloth $1.25
SETH'S BROTHER'S WIFE.
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THE COPPERHEAD.
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THE COPPERHEAD
BYHAROLD FREDERIC
NEW YORKCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS1893
COPYRIGHT, 1893, BYCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE I. ABNER BEECH 1
II. JEFF'S MUTINY 17
III. ABSALOM 35
IV. ANTIETAM 47
V. "JEE'S" TIDINGS 63
VI. NI'S TALK WITH ABNER 76
VII. THE ELECTION 90
VIII. THE ELECTION BONFIRE 106
IX. ESTHER'S VISIT 115
X. THE FIRE 133
XI. THE CONQUEST OF ABNER 146
XII. THE UNWELCOME GUEST 158
XIII. THE BREAKFAST 172
XIV. FINIS 182
THE COPPERHEAD
CHAPTER I
ABNER BEECH
It was on the night of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the oldfarm-house was burned over our heads. By that reckoning I must havebeen six or seven when I went to live with Farmer Beech, because at thetime he testified I had been with him half my life.
Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could havegone to the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart,thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading sternhazel eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shutmouth. His expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; allthe rest was bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rollingdownward in iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip,which still may be found among the farmers of the old blood in ourdistrict was, I dare say, a survival from the time of the Puritanprotest against the mustaches of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in thelatter days, had been told that this shaving on Wednesday and Saturdaynights was a New England rite, I feel sure he would never have touchedrazor again.
He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time--a tremendous worker, a"good provider," a citizen of weight and substance in the community.In all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead.He was the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work inhis meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At oneperiod he was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was beforethe episode of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-housewas supplied in those days by an irregular procession of itinerantpreachers, who came when the spirit moved and spoke with that entirefrankness which is induced by knowledge that the night is to bespent somewhere else. One of these strolling ministers regarded allattempts to protect property from lightning as an insolent defianceof the Divine Will, and said so very pointedly in the pulpit, and thecongregation sat still and listened and grinned. Farmer Beech neverforgave them.
There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyondthe power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequencethe events which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech fromhis fellows. My own recollections go with distinctness back to thereception of the news that Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguerway they cover the two or three preceding years. Very likely FarmerBeech had begun to fall out of touch with his neighbors even beforethat.
The circumstances of my adoption into his household--an orphan withoutrelations or other friends--were not of the sort to serve thisnarrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no moreexpected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchasedto toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurredany debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community whereeveryone worked as a matter of course till there was no more work todo, and all shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep,and the infrequent spells of recreation, no one talked or thought ofbenefits conferred or received. My rights in the house and about theplace were neither less nor more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer'sonly son.
In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit inthe household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was onlybecause he had been drawn off after strange gods.
At all times--even when nothing else good was said of him--Abner Beechwas spoken of by the people of the district as a "great hand forreading." His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to theend. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which hehad on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there anyoneroundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussioninvolving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him therespect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreedwith by such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough,became a formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They saidthen that his opinions were worthless because he got them from printedbooks, instead of from his heart.
What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from thetitles of the farmer's books. Perhaps there were some thirty of thembehind the glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one ortwo agricultural or veterinary exceptions, they related exclusivelyto American history and politics. There were, I recall, the firsttwo volumes of Bancroft, and Lossing's "Lives of the Signers," and"Field-Books" of the two wars with England; Thomas H. Benton's "ThirtyYears' View;" the four green-black volumes of Hammond's "PoliticalHistory of the State of New York;" campaign lives of Lewis Cass andFranklin Pierce, and larger biographies of Jefferson and Jackson, and,most imposing of all, a whole long row of big calf-bound volumes ofthe _Congressional Globe_, which carried the minutiae of politics atWashington back into the forties.
These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyisheducation. I have only the faintest and haziest recollections of whathappened when I went during the winter months to the school-house atthe Four Corners. But I can recall the very form of the type in thefarmer's books. Everyone of those quaint, austere, and beardless faces,framed in high collars and stocks and waving hair--the Marcys, Calhouns,DeWitt Clintons, and Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain'sprimitive graver--gives back to me now the lineaments of an old-timefriend.
Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff,and had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winterevenings in poring over some of these books--generally with Abner Beechat the opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rareoccasion one of the hired men would take down a volume and look throughit--the farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did notwet his big thumbs to turn over the leaves--but for the most part wetwo had the books to ourselves. The others would sit about tillbedtime, amusing themselves as best they could, the women-folk knittingor mending, the men cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider andapples and fried-cakes, as they talked over the work and gossip of thedistrict and tempted the scorching impulses of the stovehearth withtheir stockinged feet.
This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of thehousehold in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew,from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me aboutt
he things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that youngJeff was never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and moredistinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that thefavoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hardas ever, and got no more playtime than before. The master's eye waseverywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even myalphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together--orrather he talked and I listened--as if we were folk quite apart from therest.
Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all mylittle notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and JohnMarshall were among the most infamous characters in history. The otherwas that every true American ought to hold himself in daily readinessto fight with England. I gave a great deal of thought to both thesematters. I had early convictions, too, I remember, with regard toDaniel Webster, who had been very bad, and then all at once became avery good man. For some obscure reason I always connected him in myimagination with Zaccheus up a tree, and clung to the queer associationof images long after I learned that the Marshfield statesman had beenphysically a large man.
Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured byfresher antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belialwho deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall.With me the two stages of indignation glided into one another soimperceptibly that I can now hardly distinguish between them. What I dorecall is that the farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy,England, and to seem to have quite forgotten our own historic foes toliberty, so enraged was he over the modern Abolitionists. He told meabout them as we paced up the seed rows together in the spring, as wedrove homeward on the hay-load in the cool of the summer evening, aswe shovelled out a path for the women to the pumps in the farm-yardthrough December snows. It took me a long time to even approximatelygrasp the wickedness of these new men, who desired to establish negrosovereignty in the Republic, and to compel each white girl to marry ablack man.
The fact that I had never seen any negro "close to," and had indeedonly caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on thestreets of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystifiedalarm with which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finallyan old darky on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him,incredibly ragged, dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through "JumpJim Crow" down at the Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of thevillage loafers, the revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelledthat the others could laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging overtheir silly heads.
At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class,who lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places--chiefly NewEngland way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons amongthem. They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloesor a swarm of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks whichattracted my attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. Thefarmer one day brought home with him from town a pamphlet composedof anti-slavery sermons or addresses by this person. In the eveninghe read it, or as far into it as his temper would permit, beatingthe table with his huge fist from time to time, and snorting withwrathful amazement. At last he sprang to his feet, marched over tothe wood-stove, kicked the door open with his boot, and thrust theoffending print into the blaze. It is vivid in my memory still--the waythe red flame-light flared over his big burly front, and sparkled onhis beard, and made his face to shine like that of Moses.
But soon I learned that there were Abolitionistseverywhere--Abolitionists right here in our own little farmland townshipof northern New York! The impression which this discovery made uponme was not unlike that produced on Robinson Crusoe by the immortalfootprint. I could think of nothing else. Great events, which reallycovered a space of years, came and went as in a bunch together, whileI was still pondering upon this. John Brown was hanged, Lincoln waselected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment was raised anddespatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County--and all the time itseems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing fact thatsome of our neighbors were Abolitionists.
There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all.At first there was only one Abolitionist, old "Jee" Hagadorn. Then,somehow, there came to be a number of them--and then, all at once, lo!everybody was an Abolitionist--that is to say, everybody but AbnerBeech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the othersbecame, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into theground, and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the oppositedirection. The skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angrypopular feeling burst swooping over the country-side, but Beech onlystiffened his back and never budged an inch.
At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church atall. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform fromwhich the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity onevery recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whateverof talking back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But whenothers, mere laymen of the church, took up the theme, and began inclass-meetings and the Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist andthe Beast with Ten Horns and Seven Heads, in obvious connection withSouthern sympathizers, it became frankly insufferable. The farmer didnot give in without a fierce resistance. He collected all the textshe could find in the Bible, such as "Servants obey your masters,""Cursed be Canaan," and the like, and hurled them vehemently, withstrong, deep voice, and sternly glowing eyes, full at their heads. Butthe others had many more texts--we learned afterwards that old "Jee"Hagadorn enjoyed the unfair advantage of a Cruden's Concordance--andtheir tongues were as forty to one, so we left off going to churchaltogether.
Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of thecheese-factory.
The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a commonroof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten yearsold. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities ofvastly greater things than mere cheese-making. Its success among us hadstirred up in men's minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as theanswer to all American farm problems--as the gateway through which wewere to march into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recallsnow with a smile and a sigh. Farmers' wives continued to break down anddie under the strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums; thefarmers kept on hanging themselves in their barns, or flying westwardbefore the locustlike cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls turnedtheir steps townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium nevercame at all.
But at that time--in the late fifties and early sixties--thecheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreamsand roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district;their disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of atown-meeting; their chief officers were even more important personagesthan the supervisor and assessor.
Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. Ifancy he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you willsee it still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent toit in those days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer formiles around, reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice,too, outweighed all others in its co-operative councils.
But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that aman couldn't be a Christian and hold such views on the slave questionas Beech held, it was only a very short step to the conviction thatsuch a man would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theftof a horse is the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sectionsexalt to this pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasantor a woman. Among our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk.A man in our neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery orbigamy outright, than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of puttingwater into his cans.
Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I knownot--who started the story was never to be learned
--but of a suddeneverybody seemed to have heard that Abner Beech's milk had been refusedat the cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was truethat there could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. Butwhat did happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains eachmorning to test our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded thelactometer, and sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in aseparate book, and behaved generally so that our hired man knocked himhead over heels into one of his whey vats. Then the managers complainedto the farmer. He went down to meet them, boiling over with rage. Therewas an evil spirit in the air, and bitter words were exchanged. Theoutcome was that Abner Beech renounced the co-operative curds of hisearlier manhood, so to speak, sold part of his cattle at a heavy loss,and began making butter at home with the milk of the remainder.
Then we became pariahs in good earnest.
The Copperhead Page 1