by John Jakes
The newspapers had started carrying Gould’s warnings to the citizenry. A new predatory animal was abroad in the land! Beware the archmonopolist! Jephtha couldn’t recall hearing the term before, but Vanderbilt made a vivid prototype.
In the face of Gould’s carefully orchestrated campaign, one paper inexplicably reversed itself and began to praise the Commodore. It took Jephtha four days at the end of March to learn, through a member of his congregation active in the Street, the shocking reason the New York Union had changed its editorial policy.
While not openly hostile to Vanderbilt, other papers found Mr. Gould and his gratuitous warnings to be good copy. Why, Gould cried, the villainous Commodore would soon swallow so many firms and rail systems that his whim would dictate the very price of a loaf of bread on the commonest table! Blithely disregarding the source of the charges, some molders of opinion were demanding that Vanderbilt’s power be checked. They never specified how it should be done.
Recently there’d been a development to indicate that the peculiar war might be limping to an end. Faced with the law legalizing the Duane Street printing press, and already poorer by close to ten million dollars, the Commodore was said to be sick of the struggle. The member of Jephtha’s congregation with Street connections claimed Vanderbilt had invited Dan Drew to call on him, to patch things up. If that was true, the Commodore had run up the white flag for perhaps the first time in his life.
The Erie War had its comic aspects, but the seething struggle in the South had none. That tragic situation was creating hatreds that would last a generation or more.
Northern politicians continued to flood into the region lugging their despised carpetbags. With the cooperation of the so-called scalawags—Southerners who turned their backs on their own people in order to ally themselves with the Northern power bloc—the invaders were capturing control of state and local governments. The military governors encouraged it.
Private citizens of the lately defeated Confederacy had other battles on their hands. They hurled charges of shiftlessness, impudence and outright criminality at the freed black. Some had begun a guerrilla war to cow the Negro.
The war’s military organization was an innocently conceived social society founded by a group, of bored veterans around Christmas 1865. In a law office in Pulaski, Tennessee, the veterans had created a secret fraternity called the Kuklos, after the Greek word for circle. Someone had added clan to reflect the area’s Scotch-Irish heritage, and the whole thing had been transmuted to a spreading network of night riders whose aim was to discipline and sometimes punish blacks.
The clan was operating in most of the South these days. The pranks of its members had taken on an ugly tone. The illiteracy of most of the blacks was played upon. A favorite trick of the colorfully robed and hooded clansmen was to surround a Negro cottage at night and, in sepulchral voices, beg for drinks. The mounted visitors would claim to be dead men who hadn’t tasted water since perishing at, say, Shiloh Church.
When water was offered, almost endless quantities of it appeared to vanish magically through the mouth slits of the hoods. Jephtha had read the trick was performed with a tube and concealed rubber bag, but few of the victims knew that—or were sufficiently calm to think it out. One had died of a heart seizure early in April. Even the former Confederate cavalryman, Bedford Forrest, who at first had vigorously supported the clan’s activities, was reportedly disenchanted by growing excesses.
Jephtha refrained from condemnation of all Southerners, however. He felt the North should set its own house in order first.
The scorned greenhorns pouring off the immigrant boats from all sections of the Continent were being crowded into slums and manipulated to the advantage of industrialists, who used the threat of immigrant labor to beat off the demands of trade unionists. Gideon had allied himself with the unionists. He was struggling to start a small organization in the Erie yards. Jephtha respected and admired Gideon’s dedication. But he had no illusions about his son’s future. Gideon had merely exchanged one war for another.
Blacks remained an even more despised minority in the North. Jephtha needed to go no further than Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue to be reminded of that.
Every time some pastoral chore took him by the spot, he recalled four simmering days in July of ’63. Right after Gettysburg, New York had fallen into anarchy as rioters—mostly poor whites—protested the Federal draft.
Blacks had been beaten, hanged from lamp poles, had kerosene poured in their wounds, then lit. Even children had not been spared. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth had been surrounded by a howling mob of three thousand. Fortunately soldiers had arrived to shepherd two hundred Negro children and the staff to safety. Afterward the mob had rampaged through the orphanage. One frightened black girl was discovered still huddling beneath her bed. Jephtha would never forget reading the account of how she’d been beaten to death. Until such incidents were forever banished, the North had no right to be sanctimonious.
The ’63 holocaust had resulted in the burning of more than a hundred buildings and in the deaths of as many as two thousand civilians, soldiers, and police. No one would ever know the exact total. Once Federal troops had quelled the worst of the violence, a pundit had jeered, “This is a nice town to call itself a center of civilization!” Five years later, Jephtha wearily decided the same could be said of the nation. The great war had won freedom for the Negro, but there were few signs it had won equality, or even acceptance.
In view of his calling, Jephtha was always ashamed when he felt so pessimistic. He tried to remember that no era in human history had been free of the passions fed by ignorance and greed. Certainly Christ’s had not.
But the nation had been created to offer a shining hope of liberty, justice, change. Occasionally Jephtha felt progress in America was unconscionably slow, if not altogether absent. Sometimes he wondered whether Jeremiah had gone to his grave for nothing.
With his faith and his wife Molly to help him, Jephtha had learned to accept the pain of realizing his youngest son was gone. Every six months or so he still dispatched a letter to a friend in Washington and requested another search of the Federal casualty records. No new information had ever been forthcoming. The day and place of Jeremiah Kent’s dying were apparently forever hidden. Jephtha only prayed the death had not been meaningless.
In brighter moments, he knew it was not. The slave system was gone forever. The country was expanding at an unprecedented rate, and a much more worthwhile war was being won in the West. The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were annihilating time and distance. In mid-April the Union Pacific had reached its highest elevation above the sea, Sherman’s Summit at 8,248 feet, and had begun laying track on the Wyoming downgrade.
Out there, in land abounding in the free space in which men could build new futures, thousands were doing exactly that. Michael had done that with his mercantile enterprises. His letters said he had found deep satisfaction. He didn’t use the word peace, but Jephtha knew that was what he meant.
Perhaps Matt too had found his version of the same thing. His enthusiastic letters, crammed with sketches, said he and his wife Dolly were enjoying their splendid poverty in Paris. Matt’s surprising inclination toward drawing was finally receiving some direction through exposure to great museums and the ferment of the city’s art colony.
Spring weather usually banished the worst of Jephtha’s pessimism, and it was no exception this year, even though he had lately been forced to resort to spectacles for reading, and his knuckles and knees hurt a great deal of the time. When he heard an item of gossip from the Wall Street attorney who belonged to his church, his spirits positively soared.
He had resigned himself about purchasing Kent and Son, Boston. It struck him as an unattainable goal.
But something else he coveted just as shamelessly might not be unattainable. The Monday morning after he heard that, he set out for Tarrytown.
ii
Outside t
he little office, sunlight glowed through rustling trees. “Yes, sir,” the agent said. “We are the authorized representatives.” He cast a dubious eye at Jephtha’s rumpled black suit. “It’s quite expensive.”
“But it is for sale?”
“Most definitely. The owner has been confined to St. Luke’s Hospital in the city, as perhaps you know.”
Jephtha nodded.
“A ruffianly attack by street thieves, we’ve been told.”
Jephtha said nothing. He’d heard the same thing in March.
“Mr. Kent is paralyzed,” the agent went on. “He may never regain the use of his lower body. He is divesting himself of several properties.”
“Does you price include the furnishings?”
“It does.”
“Everything? Every last book? Every item of bric-a-brac?”
The agent frowned. “May I ask why that’s so important to you, Mr.—?”
“Kent.”
He said it quietly and watched for the reaction, which was pronounced. He continued. “I don’t want my name mentioned. That’s a condition of my offer. If you violate it, you’ve lost a commission.”
“Are you related to the owner?”
“Distantly. I don’t wish to be identified with the sale for personal reasons. Attorneys will act in my stead. I’ll meet the price, whatever it is.”
The agent had a stunned look.
“But only if all furnishings are left intact. Are you willing to proceed on those terms?”
An unctuous smile curled the agent’s mouth. “Of course. Buyers in this price category are not numerous. I’m sure everything can be arranged to your satisfaction.”
iii
On the seventeenth of May, Mr. Patrick Willet, contractor, sat in his wagon in the driveway of Kentland. It was a brilliant morning, breezy and full of the sweet smells of living earth and foliage. Just the preceding day, the eleventh article of impeachment had failed to gain the needed two-thirds majority in the Senate. The margin of defeat had been one vote.
Mr. Willet wasn’t thinking of that sensational news today, though. He was in a state bordering on euphoria. The reason was his prospective client, the estate’s new and somewhat unusual owner—a shabby-looking but clearly wealthy minister from the city.
The gray-haired cleric’s last name was the same as that of Kentland’s former tenant. Willet had mentioned the coincidence but had received no explanation. He didn’t press for one. The potential fee was too important.
The Reverend Kent had contacted him a week ago. Willet had eagerly agreed to drive him out from Tarrytown when he took possession of the property. He was inside doing just that. The front doors were open on darkness and a smell of dust.
Mr. Willet cut a piece of tobacco from his plug and slipped it up next to his gum. It might be a while until he was summoned. He’d gladly wait. He’d wait till judgment for an opportunity to earn the huge sum which would accompany a major alteration.
He was startled when the Reverend Kent appeared in less than five minutes.
Kent was carrying the portmanteau he’d taken into the house. It bulged now. And, curiosity of curiosities, the preacher had a scabbarded sword and an old rifle under his arm.
Kent put the carpetbag on the drive, then the rifle. He walked from the shadow of the portico to the sunlight. Almost reverently, he drew the sword a third of the way out of the brass-tipped scabbard.
Willet scrambled down and peered over the other man’s shoulder. The sword had a handsome ribbed grip and a pommel shaped like a bird’s head.
Kent noted the contractor’s interest. He raised the sword a little higher.
“It’s a French infantry briquet. Given to the founder of our family by the Marquis de Lafayette, before the Revolution.”
“Handsome,” Willet murmured. Kent slid the blade back into the scabbard and as he did, the hilt caught the sun and shot off a star of light. The minister’s dark eyes gleamed.
Fellow’s crying! the astonished contractor said to himself. There was certainly no accounting for the queerness of parsons.
That was demonstrated again as Kent carefully laid the sword, rifle and portmanteau in the back of the wagon, then inserted a key in Kentland’s front door.
“Here, Reverend!” Willet exclaimed. “Aren’t we going to have a look inside?”
“No, Mr. Willet. I have the things I came for, with the exception of one painting in the drawing room. That will have to be crated and removed later. The other mementos are going to my oldest son. He’s in a line of work I doubt you’d approve of,” Kent added with a smile. “You being the proprietor of a business, I mean.”
“What’s your boy do?”
“He’s a labor organizer.”
“You’re right. I don’t approve,” Willet shot back. “Fellows like that upset the equilibrium of society.”
“Society needs upsetting every generation or so, Mr. Willet. Peacefully, of course. Otherwise things that need changing are accepted without question.”
Willet sniffed. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, how did your son become involved in such radical work?”
“He’s not a radical, I assure you. Perhaps he’ll become one. He’ll certainly be called one. To answer your question, let’s say a passion for causes runs in the family.”
Willet was mystified when Kent glanced at the house and added, “Certain branches of the family.”
The contractor wanted to enlighten Kent with more of his views about the union movement. But he was beholden to the man, so he changed the subject:
“Well, sir, if we’re to examine the place, you oughtn’t to lock up.”
Kent climbed to the seat. “You can give me your estimate on the way back to Tarrytown.”
“Reverend, I can’t estimate repairs without seeing—”
“Wait,” Kent interrupted. “I’m not hiring you to make repairs.”
Willet’s brow shot up. “But I thought—”
The minister shook his head. He studied the sundrenched facade, smiling in a curious way.
“I never said I wanted alterations, or that I was planning to live here. I’m going to pay you to tear Kentland down.”
“Tear it down?”
“Yes, Mr. Willet. Every last stone.”
A Biography of John Jakes
John Jakes is a bestselling author of historical fiction, science fiction, children’s books, and nonfiction. He is best known for his highly acclaimed eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles series, an American family saga that reaches from the Revolutionary War to 1890, and the North and South Trilogy, which follows two families from different regions during the American Civil War. His commitment to historical accuracy and evocative storytelling earned him the title “godfather of historical novelists” from the Los Angeles Times and led to his streak of sixteen consecutive New York Times bestsellers.
Born in Chicago in 1932, Jakes originally studied to be an actor, but he turned to writing professionally after selling his first short story for twenty-five dollars during his freshman year at Northwestern University. That check, Jakes later said, “changed the whole direction of my life.” He enrolled in DePauw University’s creative writing program shortly thereafter and graduated in 1953. The following year, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Ohio State University.
While at DePauw, Jakes met Rachel Ann Payne, whom he married in 1951. After finishing his studies, Jakes worked as a copywriter for a large pharmaceutical company before transitioning to advertising, writing copy for several large firms, including Madison Avenue’s Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. At night, he continued to write fiction, publishing two hundred short stories and numerous mystery, western, and science fiction books. He turned to historical fiction, long an interest of his, in 1973 when he started work on The Bastard, the first novel of the Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes’s masterful hand at historical fiction catapulted The Bastard (1974) onto the bestseller list—with each subsequent book in the series matching The
Bastard’s commercial success. Upon publication of the next three books in the series—The Rebels (1975), The Seekers (1975), and The Furies (1976)—Jakes became the first-ever writer to have three books on the New York Times bestseller list in a single year. The series has maintained its popularity, and there are currently more than fifty-five million copies of the Kent Family Chronicles in print worldwide.
Jakes followed the success of his first series with the North and South Trilogy, set before, during, and after the Civil War. The first volume, North and South, was published in 1982 and reaffirmed Jakes’s standing as a “master of the ancient art of story telling” (The New York Times Book Review). Following the lead of North and South, the other two books in the series, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987), were chart-topping bestsellers. The trilogy was also made into an ABC miniseries—a total of thirty hours of programming—starring Patrick Swayze. Produced by David L. Wolper for Warner Brothers North and South remains one of the highest-rated miniseries in television history.
The first three Kent Family Chronicles were also made into a television miniseries, produced by Universal Studios and aired on the Operation Prime Time network. Andrew Stevens starred as the patriarch of the fictional family. In one scene, Jakes himself appears as a scheming attorney sent to an untimely end by villain George Hamilton.
In addition to historical fiction, Jakes penned many works of science fiction, including the Brak the Barbarian series, published between 1968 and 1980. Following his success with the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South Trilogy, Jakes continued writing historical fiction with the stand-alone novel California Gold and the Crown Family Saga (Homeland and its sequel, American Dreams).
Jakes remains active in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright. His adaptation of A Christmas Carol is widely produced by university and regional theaters, including the prestigious Alabama Shakespeare Festival and theaters as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand. He holds five honorary doctorates, the most recent of which is from his alma mater Ohio State University. He has filmed and recorded public service announcements for the American Library Association and hasreceived many other awards, including a dual Celebrity and Citizen’s Award from the White House Conference on Libraries and Information and the Cooper Medal from the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina. Jakes is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the PEN American Center, and Writers Guild of America East. He also serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.