North and South: The North and South Trilogy (93 page)

“Orry, why can’t you understand? Billy and I know the sad state of affairs in this country. It doesn’t matter. We love each other. We can survive the worst.”

“You think so, but I continue to believe the pressures on your marriage could be ruinous.”

Secretly, he had been influenced not only by Brown’s raid and its aftermath but by contemplation of Madeline’s unhappy marriage and the terrible toll it had taken on her. He honestly thought his sister might be equally unhappy, though for completely different reasons. He wanted to end the discussion.

“I’m sorry, Brett. I can’t allow you to do it. Please convey my regrets to Billy.”

She answered quietly. “I’ll do no such thing.”

He blinked. “Explain that remark, if you please.”

“It’s very simple. If I don’t have your blessing to marry, I’ll marry without it.”

His voice hardened. “The approval of your family no longer matters?”

“Of course it matters. I’d prefer to have it. I’d much rather keep peace between us. But if keeping peace means I can’t have Billy, peace can go to the devil.”

“Hold your tongue. You’re not entitled to make pronouncements—to say what you will and won’t do. You’re just a girl. A foolish one at that!”

Orry’s shout caused Clarissa to glance up with a slight frown. She stared at the bearded man and the young woman confronting each other, then shook her head, failing to recognize them.

Brett’s voice shook as she whispered, “Better to be foolish than what you’ve become.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you aren’t fit to tell anyone how to behave. You never smile. You’re angry with everything. I’m sorry you have to live alone. I’m sorry it makes you so miserable. But I refuse to live that way.”

Orry was stunned by his desire to strike her. He managed to restrain himself, pointed toward the front hall. “Go to your room.” With one last, venomous look, she picked up her skirts and fled.

In his bedroom an hour later, Orry lurched to the old pier glass he used for dressing. The empty sour-mash bottle dropped from his hand, thumped on the carpet, and rolled.

He peered into the glass, searching for something to disprove his sister’s accusation. He couldn’t find it. He seized the mirror with his hand and tipped it over. It fell not on the carpet but on the polished pegged floor beyond, shattering with a huge crash. He staggered toward the door, his waistcoat hanging open and his collar and the buttons of his right sleeve undone. His speech was a slurry mumble.

“It was many—and many—a year ago, in a kingdom by—in a kingdom—”

He couldn’t go on. His drink-dulled memory had failed him. He picked up a fragile chair and swung it against the wall, reducing it to kindling. In the hall he spied a small gilt mirror, jerked it from its peg, and trampled on it. Then he staggered to the staircase.

Alarmed black faces peeped at him from doorways below. He clutched the banister with his hand and somehow stumbled all the way to the bottom without breaking his neck. Another mirror loomed on his left, an ornate one Ashton had purchased in Charleston long ago. He had never realized there were so many mirrors in the house. Mirrors to show him what he was: a failure as a man, a failure in everything he had ever tried to do.

He ripped the mirror off the wall, carried it outside into the frosty dark, and hurled it against the nearest tree. Shards of glass fell like a silvery rain.

He ran back into the house, found another full bottle of sour mash, and dragged himself up the stairs again, shouting gibberish in an angry voice.

At her drawing board, Clarissa listened with a look of puzzlement. After a moment she sighed and returned to her work.

“To Charleston? In the middle of the night?” Downstairs next morning, Orry slitted his eyes against the harsh daylight. “Where was she going, a hotel?”

“No, sir,” the nervous house man responded. “To Mr. Cooper’s. She had four trunks with her. Said she planned to be there awhile.”

“Christ,” he muttered.

His intestines churned, his head hammered. Brett had run away while he lay passed out in the wreckage of his bedroom. He had never behaved like that before, never in his entire life. His shame was worse than his physical misery, and his pride was shattered. His own sister had beaten him. It might have been possible to drag her back from the Mills House or some other hotel, but she had cleverly chosen Tradd Street. She knew, and so did he, that Cooper would give her sanctuary as long as she needed it.

He kicked tinkling bits of mirror with the toe of his boot. “Clean this up.” Feeling sickness and defeat in every bone, he slowly climbed the stairs again.

On New Year’s Day, 1860, Orry wrote a letter to his sister. It was couched in vaguely threatening language, employing words such as
defiance, duty,
and
authority.
It asked for her immediate return to Mont Royal.

He sent the letter to Charleston with a slave. But even as he was writing the pass, he felt a sense of futility. It turned out to be justified. He received no answer.

A couple of days later Cooper paid a visit. Orry accused him:

“You’re abetting a family quarrel by permitting her to stay with you.”

“Don’t be an ass,” his brother retorted. “It’s better that she live with Judith and me than in some public lodging house. Brett’s perfectly all right—which is what I came to tell you. As to the rest, I am abetting nothing, unless it might be her long-overdue effort to assert her independence. It is her life, after all. She’s not some nigra girl to be married to whomever you think will produce the best offspring.”

“You son of a bitch.”

Cooper reached for his hat. “I had heard you were acting like a drunken boor. I’m sorry to discover it’s true. Good-bye.”

“Cooper, wait. I apologize. I haven’t been feeling mysel—”

His brother had already left the room.

W
ITH EVERY MONTH THAT
passed, the storm winds blew harder. Late in the spring the Democratic party convened its national nominating convention in Charleston. From the start the Douglas candidacy—Cooper’s cause—was in trouble.

In the aisles of Institute Hall on Meeting Street, in caucus rooms and on curbstones, Cooper and others argued that unless the party chose a man who could appeal to voters in other regions, the South would suffer. The Black Republicans could be worse medicine than Douglas, he insisted. Few listened. Douglas men were a rapidly shrinking minority.

Then came a critical test of principle. Douglas’s floor operatives refused to support a black code protecting slavery in the territories. Infuriated, delegates from six Southern states walked out of the hall to plan a rump convention. Huntoon proudly left with the others from South Carolina. In the joyous crowd in the gallery, Cooper spied Ashton, flushed and applauding wildly.

It was all over. After fifty-seven ballots, the convention adjourned without naming a candidate. The party was hopelessly sundered.

In early summer the regulars, or National Democrats, assembled in Baltimore and nominated Douglas. The dissidents, calling themselves Constitutional Democrats, gathered at Richmond to endorse unrestricted slavery in the territories and to nominate Kentucky’s John Breckinridge. A third splinter group tried to rally concerned citizens behind unswerving support of the Constitution, but the effort was considered a straw in a windstorm.

At the Wigwam in Chicago, Lincoln’s managers defeated Seward and won the nomination for their candidate. One statement in the platform adopted by the convention was explosive. It said Congress had no authority to condone or promote slavery by permitting its expansion into the territories. Slavery could be allowed to exist wherever it had in the past, but the Republicans stood squarely against its spread.

“Their platform is an abomination,” Huntoon declared to Cooper. “It virtually guarantees the South will fight if that ape is elected.”

“Since a fight is what you want, I’m surprised you don’t campaign for Lincoln.”

“Why, Cooper, I surely don’t know what you mean,” Huntoon said with a bland expression.

But there was a merry light in his bespectacled eyes.

In steady rain the Wide-Awakes marched in Lehigh Station.

George stood in front of the apothecary’s, watching them. The cigar clenched in his teeth had been extinguished by the rain, and the torches of the marchers fared only a little better. It was a foul night, too damp and raw for August.

The young men passed, twenty in all, wearing oilcloth capes and kepis. On their shoulders they carried brooms, ax handles, or dummy muskets. As the head of the column vanished into darkness, a small band appeared, the drums pounding, the horns blaring “Dixie’s Land,” a minstrel song that had been adopted as the anthem of all the new Republican marching clubs. An Ohioan had written the song; George had first heard it when Bryant’s Minstrels played Bethlehem last year.

Bobbing torches cast sullen light and flung long, sinister shadows. The drums woke memories of Mexico. George saw his son’s face pass in the band. Even though William’s cheeks were puffing in and out—he played a cornet—he somehow managed to smile.

All the Wide-Awakes were smiling. Why, then, did they remind him of soldiers off to war? Why did this parade, with its jaunty marchers confident of a Republican victory, fill him with thoughts of gunfire, and blood, and formless feelings of dread?

Ashton called at Tradd Street in mid-August.

“Land sakes, Brett, I thought your intended would surely be in Charleston by now!”

“I thought so too,” Brett replied. “It’s taken months for them to prepare his orders.”

“The Army always did move like an elephant,” Cooper remarked. He looked thinner than usual these days. Fatigue circles showed under his eyes. The
Star of Carolina
project was going badly, and Cooper was not encouraged by the calamitous accident which had befallen Brunel’s great Trincomalee freighter the preceding year. It had left the mouth of the Thames in September, only to be ripped apart by a huge explosion. The ship had survived, but Brunel never knew it; the report of the disaster was the last news he heard before he died on the fifteenth of September.

Ashton, of course, never paid attention to such things. With her lower lip stuck out, she patted her sister’s hand. “I surely do feel sorry for you. Is there any definite word about Billy’s arrival?”

“Yes, fortunately,” Judith put in. “It came the day before last.”

Ashton’s eyes flashed. “Tell me!”

Brett said, “Billy’s to report to Captain Foster the first week in September. Foster is the engineer who just arrived in the city. The one sent to repair Fort Moultrie.”

“Why, that’s wonderful news. It’ll be ever so convenient to have Billy here in Charleston.”

Cooper puzzled over his sister’s curious expression, her odd choice of words. Billy’s presence might be enjoyable, but why should it be convenient for anyone except Brett? Ashton must have been speaking of Brett’s situation.

Yet he wondered about that, recalling the strange glint in Ashton’s eyes. What it meant he couldn’t imagine. But then, he understood Ashton even less than he understood Orry these days.

From high in the gallery, Cooper listened to Huntoon speaking to an overflow crowd in Institute Hall. Ashton’s husband was delivering the last of several addresses in support of Breckinridge for President. Actually, the half-hour oration was largely a harangue against Lincoln.

“A vulgar mobocrat!” Huntoon thumped the podium. The crowd roared. “An illiterate border ruffian pledged to promote hatred of the South and equality for the niggers!”

Groans. Cries of “No, no!” from every corner of the hall. Unable to take any more, Cooper rose, ignoring angry stares from those around him. As Cooper left, Huntoon once more invoked Lincoln’s name, producing more booing and hissing, then a raw-throated yell:

“Kill the baboon!”

Tumultuous applause. They wanted a fight. They refused to heed what Lincoln said—that he would adhere to the platform of his party and not interfere with slavery where it already existed. They heard only their own voices prating of betrayal and the need for resistance. Cooper was more discouraged than he had been in years.

Billy got a shock when he arrived at Fort Moultrie. In fact, he got several.

He remembered Charleston as a friendly, hospitable place where the pace of life was leisurely. Now an air of suspicion and near hysteria prevailed. People talked warmly of secession, hatefully of Lincoln and the Little Giant. They eyed Billy’s uniform in a distinctly unfriendly way.

The second shock came when he realized the nature of the work to be done at the fort on Sullivan’s Island. Drifted sand was to be cleared away from the parapet because armed men could too easily climb those slopes and storm the ramparts. Some of the fort’s fifty-five guns were to be repositioned to provide better protection for Castle Pinckney and Fort Sumter in the harbor. These were preparations for war.

Everyone, military or civilian, knew the Federal garrison probably could not withstand an organized military attack—or even that of a determined mob. Sullivan’s Island was a long, sandy strip of land fronting the sea. Round about the old fort, which was actually the third structure to bear the name Fort Moultrie, stood any number of summer residences. The fort’s interior was vulnerable to sniper fire from the nearby rooftops.

Furthermore, the Moultrie garrison was small: sixty-four men and eleven officers. The core of the fighting force consisted of two companies of the First Artillery—the total including eight regimental bandsmen—under the command of Colonel John Gardner, a relic of the War of 1812 who was ready for retirement. A brusque Yankee from Massachusetts, Gardner didn’t hide his distrust of all Southerners—a poor practice for a commandant who had to deal with and employ local people.

The senior captain, Abner Doubleday, was a tough, capable officer who had graduated from West Point the summer George arrived. Doubleday was especially disliked in Charleston because he made no secret of being an abolitionist.

Four members of the engineers were stationed at Moultrie—Captain John Foster and Lieutenants Meade, Snyder, and Hazard. Also on the post during daylight hours were some civilian workmen Foster had hired in the city and a few artisans he had imported from the North.