The Bride of Texas (77 page)

The normally prompt Ambrose didn’t send his reply to this last (or so he thought) unclear order until seven hours after he received it. It may have been that his hands were full with the difficult transfer of troops to Vicksburg. Or perhaps he finally lost his temper. When he sat down at the telegraph at two o’clock in the morning, he dictated a message to Stanton that was not entirely coherent. “Your dispatch revoked the order of the President in reference to the Chicago Times came too late. I had already sent telegraphic orders revoking my order. I am very much embarrassed and beg to ask for specific instructions in such cases.”

Despite stylistic or perhaps grammatical ambiguities, Lincoln and Stanton must have understood the wire. Of course,
what they read was the brief, amended version. Ambrose had written a longer, more coherent message, but deleted his conclusion. My grandson found it among his papers and included it in his dissertation. Originally, Ambrose had written: “I am very much embarrassed and beg to ask for specific instructions in such cases or be allowed to resign my commission. The latter will be most agreeable to me if it is for the interest of the public service, and I really believe that it is. I cannot change my views as to the policy that should be pursued in this department, and I am sorry they do not coincide with those of the government. I respectfully ask to be allowed to resign.”

Lincoln did not accept his resignation and Ambrose continued to serve, with his usual verve and devotion. They say that no Union general stood on so many battlefields as my friend.

The letter which, according to Stanton’s June 4 telegram, had been mailed June 1, did not reach Ambrose in Kentucky until June 12. In addition to various suggestions concerning Hascall, Morton, and general circumspection, Stanton added, a little late, a postscript that must have seemed at the very least ironic to Ambrose by then: “Since writing the above letter the President has been informed that you have suppressed the publication or circulation of the Chicago Times in your department. He directs me to say that in his judgment it would be better for you to take an early occasion to revoke that order. The irritation produced by such acts is in his opinion likely to do more harm than the publication would do. The Government approves of your motives and desires to give you cordial and efficient support. But while military movements are left to your judgment, upon administrative questions such as the arrest of civilians and
the suppression of newspapers not requiring immediate action the President desires to be previously consulted.”

Ambrose did not respond to this, he merely confirmed receipt of the letter by telegram on June 12, noting that it had “only come to hand today”.

The entire difficult, precedent-setting comedy of errors was hardly Ambrose’s fault. And yet, because of it, General Burnside will apparently be remembered as an accomplice in the suppression of freedom of expression. The incident has a postscript of its own, to be found in a letter Lincoln sent May 17, 1864 to Congressman Arnold, the author of that guardedly neutral second wire which caused the president to attempt to rescind the rescindment. Lincoln wrote: “I am far from certain today that the revocation was not right.”

A Pythian, grammatically contorted sentence. It hardly indicates, however, that the president was convinced he had made the right decision.

When the war was over, Jasmine left Cincinnati and vanished without a trace. We didn’t get a single letter from her. Shortly afterwards we moved to Chicago, where Humphrey had been given a professorship at the university. A letter I sent her from there care of Mr. Carmichael’s plantation was returned as un-deliverable several months later.

Weeks and months passed, and then years. The newspapers carried strange and unpleasant news from the South. Hordes of freed slaves poured into Chicago, and they soon created a ring of poverty around the noisy and dynamic city centre. There were also spectacular, if not entirely respectable, tales of success. Humphrey tried to see things in philosophical terms; the
first step is freedom, he would say, then comes knowledge, then better living standards, and finally full equality of rights and prosperity. He spoke beautifully about it, and everything seemed simple and only a matter of time. I must say that he didn’t stop at philosophy. He became the heart and soul of all kinds of committees founded by the abolitionists while liberated slaves still interested them. He opened schools for Negro children and set up night courses for their parents. Then, unexpectedly, he died.

I was barely forty. I was still writing novels — not as many as before, because I didn’t need to. I had money enough. The children were growing and I had already put more in their bank accounts than they deserved — but no, they were good children. Loretta was a pretty and surprisingly feminine young lady. Jimmy was a diligent student and a star pupil at the Latin school in Chicago. And I went on writing. Why? Because I enjoyed it. Because my female readership was growing. And because, in between assembling the stories my readers were waiting for — stories that resembled reality as they wished it to be — I was working on
Carolina Bride
.

I never stopped thinking of Jasmine. It occasionally struck me as odd that I should think of her so much; I felt almost guilty about it, because I thought far less about my own former tomboy, even after she got engaged to a young New York attorney who had entered politics and was starting to get rich, quickly, steadily, and considerably. I preferred not to ask how; it was during General Grant’s infamous second term as president.

Once, a few years before Humphrey died, after I had spent a week wrestling with my serious novel without managing to get a single line on paper, I was overcome by an unbearable longing to see that lovely girl who used to pour Ambrose’s cognac in silence and then stare out the window at the stars
over Cincinnati — who had once asked me anxiously, “Miz Tracy, do you think that — they’ll make peace?” My longing was so great that I dropped everything and set out by train to Mr. Carmichael’s plantation in Carolina.

I had never been there, and the ruins that remained of the plantation could only hint at its former beauty. The big house had been hit by cannon-fire and only a few scorched timbers remained, along with four Doric pillars that had nothing left to support. Even the Negro cabins looked run down. A few goats grazed behind them and an old man in tattered clothes sat in front of one of them, watching me with bloodshot eyes as I stumbled amid the wreckage of faded glory. I spoke to him and he mumbled something in reply.

“I’m looking for a young coloured woman called Jasmine,” I said.

The old man just shook his head.

“Or a cook that everyone here knew. She had only one leg. Her name was Gospel.”

Nothing.

“Wasn’t this Mr. Carmichael’s plantation?”

“Can’t say,” said the old man. “I ain’t from here.”

This poor unfortunate had joined the northward exodus, but when he couldn’t go any farther he’d been left to die at the Methodist manse in the village. The minister’s wife had fed him chicken soup and put him back on his unsteady feet, and now he was tending the minister’s goats out here and gazing longingly to the North, where he no longer had the strength to go.

I returned to my hired carriage and drove into the village, with the image of the lovely girl and her no-account Hasdrubal before my eyes.

The minister didn’t know them either. He had come to the village during the last year of the war, and had only witnessed
the general exodus of Negroes from the plantation. The owner had died earlier, during a bombardment by General Sherman’s wild cannoneers. I went home to Chicago.

I reluctantly returned to
Carolina Bride
and, with much editing, the kind my editor would have sought in vain in my other manuscripts, I tried to put into words reality as I remembered it, not as I wished it could have been. I reread what Poe had to say about consistency of tone, about how close poetry is to music. I even made a fair copy of excerpts from Jasmine’s story for Humphrey to read, something I had never done before. Humphrey used to tease me about my novels, and after his own literary fiasco I was reluctant to hurt his pride. But by then he had gotten over it, and besides, Jasmine’s story was no trip to the altar. It was serious; it mirrored real life — not mine, of course, but the life of my lovely girl and her race. Like so many professors, Humphrey understood literature better than I did; he just didn’t know how to write it.

Humphrey endorsed my theory about consistency of tone, although he did remark that Poe was thinking of forms smaller than a novel. And in Dickens, he reflected, one could hardly speak of consistency of tone, but there was no denying that Dickens mirrored life. “It’s odd. If there is anything at all to your — mm — artifacts, Lorraine, then it is consistency of tone. They are essentially farces in which nothing serious happens and nothing serious is said.”

This got me thinking. That couldn’t have been what Poe meant by consistency of tone. Or was it? He said,
“In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design.”
If my trips to the altar had any compositional quality at all, it was in the way the tones harmonized with each other. There were no dissonant modulations to disturb their simple melodies. And hadn’t Poe also written that
“He who pleases is of more importance
to his fellow men than he who instructs”
? Yes, perhaps — but I recalled Humphrey lifting a volume of Thackeray as if it were the host, and I thought of Gospel and her spell-casting son, of the gastronomical passion of the plantation-owner killed by Sherman’s artillery, of the philosophical debate between the benign slave-owner and the abolitionist manufacturer from the North as Jasmine had described it to me. And I struggled with my
Carolina Bride
.

Then Humphrey died, and in my grief, which lasted many long months, the work started to go amazingly well.

Everything in the manuscript was based on fact; unlike my stories of nuptial fun and games,
Carolina Bride
was written with exhaustive preparation. Everything I wrote was based on first-hand testimony and evidence I found in abolitionist newspapers, in Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Frederick Douglass, in Dickens’s
American Notes
, or in what Jasmine herself had told me or what I had observed myself during our occasional trips to the South.

And the plot unfolded. Jasmine and Hasdrubal attempted to travel north with the Underground Railroad, but only Jasmine made it. Bounty-hunters caught Hasdrubal and after many dramatic vicissitudes (all taken from life) the former domestic slave and the object of so much feminine attention found himself on a rice plantation in the deep South. Old Gospel, now an invalid living on the charity of the inheritor of the plantation, hanged herself soon after they sold her son Hasdrubal down the river. The novel was already five hundred pages long, and everything in it had actually happened. I had merely gathered all these authentic tales into a single story. But because I had managed to maintain a consistency of tone, the effect was not that of an unrealistic compilation, but rather that of a mournful epic critique of the times, and of one part of
our beloved and afflicted Union.

The bass line — no, the ubiquitous lovely soprano — of the story was Jasmine, that sad caramel damsel, and her fear when she drummed up the courage to ask Ambrose about the war — because my assurances were not enough for her, since I was not a soldier — and the general, upset by his difficulties with Vallandigham, looked out at her from behind his chestnut side-whiskers and moustache and said, “When we defeat them, child! Not sooner!” Jasmine stepping off the train, going all the way to the Carmichael plantation on foot but finding it in ruins. The ancient Negro couple who had stayed there, eking a living out of what they could harvest from a wretched little field, telling her how Hasdrubal had been sold on the eve of good old Massa Lincum’s great war, and Jasmine travelling south, asking around, trying to get close to her sweetheart through the chaos that was Dixie.

The ugliest of the strange new events that the papers had started writing about was the appearance of a hitherto unknown organization of white Southerners. Jasmine finally meets Hasdrubal, but their bliss is only a few days old when the organization strikes. Hasdrubal winds up hanging from a tree, a burning cross behind him.

Jasmine stands above the morass of failed escapes, all of it painted in the sombre colours of mourning, the sombre consistency of tone, all of it the awful truth. As I dipped my pen to finish writing that song — and I’m not ashamed to admit I had tears in my eyes — the postman arrived with a large coloured envelope bearing the letterhead of a Chicago restaurant.

The disgrace — and if it was a disgrace, then whose was it? — in
Chicago was not Ambrose’s final calamity.
“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,”
wrote Shakespeare, and this applies exactly to Ambrose, if we replace the word
evil
with
calamity
or
muddle
or the greyer word
setback:
Fredericksburg, Chicago, the bungled opportunity at Petersburg that entered the history of the war as “The Crater”. I heard about what preceded the latter long after the war, from the lips of First Lieutenant Duty, in a Chicago restaurant called The Witches’ Kitchen.

Ambrose’s only successes were in trivial matters. They were not the stuff of ballads. Two months after the embarrassment in Chicago, after he had managed the exemplary transfer of troops to reinforce Grant at Vicksburg, while he was pondering the operation against Braxton Bragg across the Cumberland Hills to Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, he came up with an idea that might have inspired military bards to poetry, had it not originated with Burnside the bungler. He even carried his idea out, but — how else? — in a manner far less spectacular than Sherman would do it later, in Georgia.