Chaneysville Incident (55 page)

“I don’t know what all the reading had done for him; it may have changed his outlook, but it didn’t show. He wrote about the Buffalo convention in a very flat style, recording votes, positions, and not doing much else. He made it sound like a sewing circle, when actually it was one of the most important events of the decade. The New York blacks had always been more militant than the Philadelphia people, and the ones in Buffalo were downright rebellious, and during the course of the convention, a man named Henry Highland Garnet got up and called Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner patriots and called for revolt among the slaves. Tough words: ‘You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die free men than live to be slaves.’ It caused quite a stir, and a motion was made to adopt it as the sentiment of the convention. They called the roll in alphabetical order; G.K. was the last delegate to vote. He voted no. The motion failed by one.”

“After all that, he voted no?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know any more about it than that. There’s nothing more in his journal about that, or about anything to do with the Abolitionist movement. Maybe he got disgusted with it. There were all kinds of factions now; the whole movement was dividing over militancy, and over whether or not blacks should be more or less prominent, and whether it was proper to buy slaves in order to free them, and whether or not women should be allowed to vote in meetings—all
kinds
of things. Maybe he just walked away from it all. But the next things he writes about are trails and points of vantage and concealment, and the wholesale price of corn.”

“What… Oh. Moonshine.”

“That’s right. Moonshine. Sometime in the fall of 1843 he left Philadelphia and came across the mountains, and spent a good bit of time exploring the mountains hereabouts. I’d say he must have arrived in mid-September. Not that anybody saw him; it just seems that he would have needed that much time to scout the area as thoroughly as he did. He drew maps, routes of access, charted caves, everything. He spent some time improving shelters, expanding natural caves and such. And he bought corn. He bought it through an agent, a man named Mickle, down in the South County, and he had Mickle believing he was a white man who was buying food for a plantation owner in Virginia. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but he waved enough money in Mickle’s face to keep him quiet and honest. And he bought the corn, and picked it up at a South County mill, and nobody figured out what it was going for. Or where it was going. Which was up in the mountains, a little here and a little there. By the end of November he had everything set up—I guess he brought the hardware with him, or maybe he made it; I don’t know. He let his mash ferment, and in late February he started to cook.

“He didn’t cook much that year, just a few hundred gallons. But he cooked carefully and did different batches in different ways. In late April he came down from the mountains and looked up his buddy Mickle and told him that he had come up with some whiskey. Mickle was greedy enough to handle the selling for a large profit. But I don’t thing C.K. was much interested in profit; he wanted to know which one of his formulae had worked the best. He found out by how much of each Mickle sold, and how fast. That fall, he had Mickle buying more corn, but without the pretense about the plantation. Of course, Mickle still thought C.K. was a white man. C.K. cooked again that winter, using the most popular recipe, adding a few variations. And that spring the whiskey that sold the best was exactly the formula he thought it would be. And then he was ready to go into business.

“He has it all laid out in the journal, exactly what he did and exactly how he did it: transactions made, actions taken. There isn’t a single place where he puts down a question, or a doubt; it’s all facts and logic, step by step. First he went out by himself, at night, looking over cornfields by moonlight, rousting farmers out of bed and buying their corn before it was halfway ready. He bought the best corn, and arranged contracts for delivery. When the time came, Mickle delivered wagonloads to points C.K. set up. By late November he had gotten the mash stored and the accounts paid. Then he killed Mickle and—”

“What?”

“He killed Mickle,” I said. “What did you expect him to do?”

“I don’t know. Not that.”

“Why not? It’s perfectly logical. He couldn’t have somebody like Mickle knowing what he was doing and how, and probably even where. He had to kill him.”

“But you said he voted against—”

“A call for slave insurrection. It was a stupid idea, and Henry Highland Garnet didn’t know what he was talking about. He had been born in slavery but had gotten out of it when he was a child; he spent the rest of his life being a pampered darling in Troy, New York, and screwing liberal white ladies. C.K. was probably laughing all the time. And whatever he thought, that vote doesn’t make him nonviolent.”

“But—”

“The man had been a slave twice and could have been taken back at any time. He’d lost a wife, maybe seen her killed. You think he was going to lose sleep over some piece of poor white trash? The man couldn’t be trusted; he had to go.”

“Well, why didn’t he find somebody he
could
trust?”

I just looked at her.

“You’re going to say there was nobody he could trust, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not going to tell you that. Because I’ve already told you enough times, and you don’t understand. But it’s true anyway, whether you understand it or not.”

“All right,” she said. “Never mind the reason. He killed the man.”

“Yes,” I said. “He killed the man. And then he made his mash and cooked his whiskey, and in the spring of 1845 he loaded it into a freight wagon and hauled it over the mountains to Philadelphia. He sold it there. I don’t know exactly how he went about it, because he evidently didn’t take the journal with him, and all he wrote down when he got back was the money he had made and the places where he had deposited it. All solid banks. And it was a good bit of money for the time, evidently. I’m not too sure about the conversion. But none of that is really all that important at this stage. What is important is that he had some whiskey left, not enough to make it profitable to haul it east, but too much for private consumption. As a matter of a fact, C.K. didn’t even drink whiskey, or anything else besides water. I don’t know why; I guess he had just never gotten into the habit. At any rate, he didn’t know enough about the stuff to judge on his own what was good.

“Anyway, he decided to sell the stuff locally. He drove his wagon into town with just one barrel loaded on the back, and he stopped on the shady side of the town square, right in front of the old jail, and he tapped the keg and took a tin cup and handed out free samples to all the old bench-sitters and railbirds and farmers that were hanging around, and then, when the barrel was empty, he just drove away without a word to anybody. Then he waited about a week, until the word had time to get around, and then he came back, but he came at night, with the whiskey in jugs instead of kegs, and he went to the houses of all the top men in town, the doctors and the lawyers and the men on the civil list, and he sold it to them, six jugs a man, no more, no less. They had heard about it by this time—everybody had heard about that whiskey; it was the best whiskey anybody around had ever tasted, and this was whiskey-making country. So they bought, and they paid his price, and for weeks after they talked about it; not so much about the whiskey—they all knew about the whiskey by now, from the railbirds and the bench-sitters—but about who hadn’t been offered any. It was a good way to assure a market, and I have a suspicion C.K. liked the idea of a bunch of white men giving each other airs over a colored man’s whiskey, not even knowing that he was colored or that what they had gotten was the bottom of the barrel. But that isn’t really important, either. What is important is that selling that whiskey made him a part of the Town. It brought him into contact with the most powerful men and the best-known men, and it made him well known. That was about the best way to be sure of his safety; because if somebody saw him and said, ‘Isn’t that a runaway nigger?’ thinking to haul him south and sell him, they’d take him before a local magistrate, and that local magistrate would think he was white; and what’s more, he wouldn’t want to see the source of the best whiskey he’d ever had going south. So after that, C.K. became a lot more open. Not that he let anybody know where he came from, or what he did, or where he hid out in the mountains, but he did come into town now and again. And that meant he got to know people. He became good friends with Nelson Gates, the bootblack, and with two other men, John Crawley and John Graham; he got to know them because he recognized them as the two who had been on the wagon that came for the runaways. They introduced him to the preacher, John Fiddler, but C.K. never had much use for him, even though he did write that his first impressions about the local blacks had to be wrong if even the ministers were risking working for the Underground. And he met William Maclay Hall.

“C.K. met Hall after the second time he sold whiskey locally, in 1846. Hall had just come to town to read law for the bar examination. He had been here before—his father was the local Presbyterian minister—but he had been away in college. How he and C.K. met, exactly, I don’t know, but I do know their acquaintanceship, at the beginning, was based on whiskey. Up until that time, C.K. didn’t drink at all, but he had written about something that Gates and Crawley drank—he didn’t say anything about Graham drinking it—which he called ‘grog.’ It wasn’t, really, since true grog doesn’t have any sweetening; Gates and Crawley drank theirs with molasses. C.K., it seems, was afraid to try it, but then he came into contact with Hall, who evidently didn’t have a whole lot of experience with whiskey, and C.K. started experimenting on him, feeding the stuff to Hall to see how much of it he could take. C.K. found Hall’s limit and noted that ‘the brew is seductive. Seven such mixtures, taken over the course of an evening, is sufficient. More violates the limits of sanity.’ Then C.K. figured he knew enough to start drinking himself. So Hall probably changed C.K.’s personal habits. And he also changed his mind. I don’t know when they talked, or how often, but they must have done so at great length whenever they did, and seriously; the journal is peppered with notes on the conversations, thoughts C.K. could not understand, or wanted to think about and refute—”

“So he did end up trusting somebody,” she said.

I thought about it; it hadn’t occurred to me that way before. “No,” I said, finally. “I don’t think you could say he trusted Hall. There’s no evidence that he told Hall anything of his history, or anything like that, or even where he made whiskey, or even that what he sold locally wasn’t the only whiskey he made, or even who he sold it to around here. But I suppose you could say he trusted Hall’s ideas, at least enough to give them a trial. Because in 1848 Hall convinced him that the solution to the slavery question—they had some arguments about that too; C.K. had taken Hall up strongly by saying that any man who thought slavery was a question ought to be shot—was through the political process. It was a pretty sophomoric idea, but Hall was a young man, and he convinced C.K. that it was worth a try. So in 1848, C.K. gave Hall money to publish broadsides on behalf of the candidacy of Martin Van Buren, laying out all the arguments for Van Buren, and the anti-expansion slavery position, which Van Buren supposedly held. Well, it turned out that Van Buren wasn’t any better than anybody else as far as slavery was concerned, and as for C.K.’s little experiment with the electoral process, in this County Martin Van Buren got exactly one vote—Hall’s.

“After that, C.K. gave up on politics. But the business with Hall had gotten him involved again in what was going on in the world. The notes he made in the journal started to move beyond just comments on the conversations, and notations about what corn to buy, and at what price. He started to speculate about what kind of action
would
be effective against slavery. It’s pretty clear that he had come out of whatever isolationist shell he had been in, and was ready to do something again.

“In early 1850 he came into contact with the slaves who had been brought here and freed on the old Methodist plan and he began to speculate that he could plow some of the profits he was making from the whiskey into purchasing slaves and freeing them in Canada, or in Liberia. But he rejected the idea, mostly because he saw it wouldn’t do any good. For one thing, prime field hands were going for about two thousand dollars a head by this time, and he couldn’t have purchased that many, even though his profits were good. And to C.K.’s way of thinking, it wouldn’t help anybody. Oh, a few individuals would be freed, and that would be nice for them, but C.K. wasn’t overly concerned about individuals; he wanted to attack the system. And buying individual slaves was never going to do anything about that. Even if he could somehow manage to buy enough to affect the market, the only effect it would have would be to stimulate it. So he discarded that idea, and the others that occurred to him—contributing to Abolitionist newspapers, that kind of thing. Because one thing Hall had done for him was to make him think in terms of larger processes: politics, general movements; in particular, economics.

“C.K. had never thought much about economics—few people at this time had—but when he did, he realized that there was simply no way to attack slavery. It was entrenched. It was the basis of the Southern system, and the South produced cotton for the North, so it was the basis of the whole national economy. Even the Abolitionists never really approached the question from that angle; they talked of morals and they talked of politics, but they didn’t talk about the fact that if they had abolished slavery, the economy of the entire nation would have been destroyed.

“But C.K. realized it and recognized what it meant: that all the newspapers and all the pamphlets in the world weren’t going to do any good. Because slavery was not a moral evil, it was an economic system that worked very well, and the only way to get anybody to change it was either to come up with something better or to make it work less well. He thought about that, and he realized that the only sane way to attack slavery was in more or less the same way that Fiddler and Crawley and Graham were attacking it: by stealing slaves out of the South. Not that they thought of it that way; C.K. wrote that they were too busy helping people to do anything useful. But what he figured out was that the whole slavery ‘question’ revolved around a single issue: whether a slave was a person or a thing. That’s what the constitutional argument had been about. That’s what the Dred Scott arguments were about. But the weakness of the arguments and the system was that a slave was both. Yes, he was a self-perpetuating, self-repairing, self-sustaining, highly intelligent work animal, but he was also a person, with a will, and a brain. And, most important, feet.”