The Trouble with Tom (14 page)

Framed at
Goodspeed's Book Shop, Inc.
18 Beacon Street, Boston
November 1, 1849, No. 8388

There is no telling who the portrait is of, or of how the deceased may have acquired it. Eventually, the contents of some other box might reveal it-and it might prove to be of no particular importance anyway, at least not to us. Who really knows the man's importance to the deceased himself?

I suppose the first time I ever had to pick through a dead man's possessions was in San Francisco. That time I'd been trying to track down a local swindler, an Alcatraz ex-con who'd run a mining scam that had involved planting gems on worthless land, and a resulting scandal that led to a prominent San Francisco banker drowning himself in the Bay. The ex-con was a slippery customer, very hard to find . . . not least because he'd been dead since 1923. But they did have his remaining possessions in innumerable boxes at the local historical society. I looked in vain for an obvious smoking gun among his papers. Or, for that matter, an
actual
gun in one of the boxes, which wouldn't have half surprised me. And there was indeed one suspicious-looking note that read, "Meet me at 5 by the tower clock. Make sure that you are not watched." But that was all. Everything else was just folder after folder of receipts, laundry tickets, battered and folded-up pamphlets, cigar wrappers, and the like. This was the mockingly ordinary debris of a life, any life at all.

"Box Forty-six, Moncure Conway," the librarian says without moving her head.

More photos. Really, they seem terribly out of place here, these daguerreotypes and tintypes, in this room of blond-wood tables and buzzing overhead fluorescents. If I ran a library, I'd build a string of period rooms, one for each century, where you could take your materials to read. A nice fainting sofa, a damasked ottoman to prop your feet upon, some heavy velvet curtains of a phantasmal oriental pattern, and the yellow pallor of a gaslight chandelier: throw in a parlor organ and some Currier and Ives prints on the wall, and you're ready to spend the day examining daguerreotypes—or, at least, acquiring a good solid laudanum habit.

I sort through the photos. Deceased subject. Deceased subject's child. Deceased subject's deceased child. Wife. Subject again. Subject in front of apartment in Paris. In front of apartment in London. New York. Wife again. Soon-to-be-deceased baby. Chid. Chid. Human hair.

What?

I hold up the photograph: it is startling. It is in
color.
There were, after all, crude color processes even back then. But out of the sheaves of photographs in these boxes, in a dead world of monochrome, it is the only one in color: and it is, of all things, a photograph of a lock of human hair. Brown, with a few gray strands. It looks exactly like the sweeping off the floor of a neighborhood Supercuts. But underneath is a note, written in an ancient hand.

This bit of Paine's hair was exhibited at the Thomas Paine exposition
in South Place Chapel, London, 1893, by Mr. Edward Smith,
biographer of Cobbett,-who carried Paine's body from New Rochelle
to England in 1819. The hair was given to me by my friend Edward
Smith. It is kept in the original paper inscribed "Mr. Paine's Hair" in
the handwriting of
B.
Tilly
Cobbett's agent—whose handwriting is
well known to Edward Smith and myself

-Moncure Conway

I read it over and again. My eyes shift between the incongruity of the faded century-old handwriting, and the living color of human substance.

If, around 1850, you were to pick the one person least likely to cross paths with the body or soul of Tom Paine, then you could hardly have done worse than to choose Moncure Conway. At eighteen years old, he was a 'Young Virginia" ideologue in name and in fact: as the secretary of the Southern Rights Association, he was an ardent defender of the Old Dominion's honor against the slanders of ignorant Northerners like William Lloyd Garrison. After all, what did the abolitionists know?
Slavery
did not even really exist in the Virginia that Conway knew and loved.

"The word
slave
was not used," he later recalled. 'We spoke of
free negroes
and
servants."
There were
servants
on the Falmouth estate that Moncure grew up on; it was the largest house in that city, one befitting a wealthy clan of gentleman farmers and judges that could count George Washington among its ancestors. Moncure was a bookish child who took what he read seriously—and what he read, above all else, was the Bible. Riding through the abandoned old villages of rural Virginia, where nothing remained but crumbling old chimneys of vanished houses, he came face-to-face with his own ancestral calling. "At Acquia church, weird in its solitude and desolation," he wrote, "I paused for a time, and tried to picture my great-great-grandfather, Parson Conway, perched in the little black pulpit high up a column, and his congregation gathered there a hundred years before. He was the only clergyman in our family line."

And so it was in 1850 that the Conway clan gained its second minister. Moncure became a circuit preacher, riding rural routes and raining holy brimstone upon bewildered farmers. When not in the pulpit, he could be found in local lyceums, propounding his novel new theory that he had arrived at after reading the latest work of naturalist Louis Aggasiz on the differentiation of species. Blacks, Conway helpfully explained, were not covered by the Bill of Rights. They were not covered by state laws either. Slaves—servants, rather—were not protected by any human law at all. Because, you see,
they were not human.

Granted, he thought blacks should be allowed to read and go to schools-he was not a cruel man, after all!-and he remained attached to the memory of the black nurse who had raised him in the family mansion: "I remember the comely coffee-coloured face of my nurse, Maria Humstead, nearly always laughing, as if I were a joke," he fondly recalled. "Her affection was boundless, and her notions of discipline undeveloped." No, he was not a hateful man. He was a racist, and that was not the same thing. He believed in race: he believed it marked a natural border. On one side of that border were humans. And on the other side were . . . not
quite
humans.

This otherness was always the implicit assumption of slavery—but to make it explicit, couched in terms of genus and species?-this was a little much even for his fellow Young Virginians. But that was Moncure Conway. He was the soul of the Southern Rights Association, and the hardest of the hard Southerners. He was the one man in Virginia who could give a roomful of slaveholders pause because he was . . . well,
too racist.

Even amid all these labors, Conway still liked to come home for a spell, and recline in the fields of his childhood. Gathering up his hunting flintlock one sunny morning, and an old copy of
Blackwood's
Magazine
to while away the hours, Moncure set out into the wilds outside Falmouth. He came to a spring by the side of the path, and cupped a broad folded leaf to gather himself a small handful of cold water. His thirst sated, he sat down and set his flintlock aside. The woods, the water, the sky above—these were elements of his native land that he happily surveyed. Suddenly two slave children came rustling out of the bushes—stark naked. They were carrying water cans, and they set about filling them, completely unashamed of their own nakedness.

"I talked with them a little," Conway recalled, "found them rather bright, and, when they had disappeared, meditated more deeply than ever before on the condition of their race in America."

Troubled as he was, turning to his magazine hardly helped. Leafing through it, he found himself drawn into a minister's essay, one musing upon the nature of the "true self." It struck unaccountably but inexorably at his heart. He suddenly looked up at the sky, and then at the ground, the innocent haunt of the young black children. Then he looked at himself with his gun, bewildered.
"What
was I doing out there with a gun hying to kill the happy little creatures of
earth and sky?"'
he muttered, appalled. 'Was it for this that I was born?"

Shaken, he went home and set down his gun, never to pick it up again. He was still secretary of the Southern Rights Association, still a preacher of dogma and damnation. But something was changing inside Moncure Conway.

Methodist itinerants lived on horseback—they had no fixed address, no set routes, and no real means of room and board except for the kindness of congregation families in each town. It was asceticism with saddlebags. Conway rode the lonelier routes of the Old Dominion, following the melancholy circuit that the moralizing historian Parson Weems had traveled decades before. Strange men and decayed villages would appear like conjured magic in the deserted woods; one day, Conway found an impoverished Corsican carrying a wheezing hurdy-gurdy, and there in the forgotten road the two men played old songs, easing their road weariness for a brief spell. And then—it was back on the path again, hastening toward the next village to warn against dancing, against immorality, against losing their immortal soul to hell.

In the course of these wanderings, he came across a fertile cluster of farms near Brookville. He stopped at their meetinghouse out of simple curiosity, and found a religious service conducted in a dignified and meditative silence; he left strangely moved, and stopped by several more times, his theological curiosity piqued. After several quiet observations, he was greeted outside of the meetinghouse by Roger Brookes, a wise and respected voice of the community. Brookes proved to be the first Quaker the young man had ever spoken to in his life.

Without even realizing it, Conway had met a leader of the most progressive of Quaker communities—the Hicksites. The term meant nothing yet to the Methodist preacher, who had never heard of Elias Hicks, Paine's
Age of Reason
, or the struggles of liberal Quakers decades before. But what he did understand was what he could see with his own eyes: gentle people, well-ordered houses, prosperous farms. And as a Southerner, this last fact was absolutely perplexing. The Hicksites were antislavery, after all, and . . . and . . . Why were their farms so superior to others in the Virginia countryside?

Church elder Brookes regarded Conway silently for a long time.

"Has it ever occurred to thee," he finally said, "that it may be because of paying wages to all who work for us?"

Their conversation politely turned elsewhere, but after leaving the Quaker settlement behind, Conway was thrown into inner turmoil. The men and women he met were cultivated, charitable, and cheerhl: they were good Christians. 'Yet what I was preaching as the essentials of Christianity," he wrote incredulously,
"were
unknown among them.
These beautiful homes were formed without terror of hell, without any cries of what shall we do to be saved?" How could this be?

Another blow came with the death of his old nursemaid. Standing by her grave, he found himself in disbelief at his own claims about her race.
These
were the people he claimed as being something other than human—the very people who had raised him? His doubt became an abscess, and his vindictive old Christian God meting out damnation and resurrection, victory and slavery, all this now appeared crude and senseless. Conway was in spiritual agony, and each sermon became harder for him to deliver. He pondered joining the Quakers, but upon visiting them he found that grave old Roger Brookes knew better.

"Thee will find among us a good many prejudices," the elder counseled, "for instance, against music, of which thou art fond, and while thou art mentally growing would it be well to commit thyself to any organized society?" Conway knew Brookes was right, but where else could he turn? Desperate, the pious young man wrote a letter to the minister whose essay he had read in
Blackwood's,
an essay urging truthfulness to oneself and to what one knows to be just and right: "About a year ago I commenced reading your writings. I have read them all and studied them sentence by sentence. I have shed many burning tears over them: because you would gain my assent to Laws which . . . I have not the courage to practice."

When Conway looked upon his old Southern nationalism, his defenses of slavery, his bitter Old Testament God, his heart broke: he could not believe in them anymore. But what was he to believe in instead—and how could he believe in these things here, in Virginia?

The unseen and mysterious minister made a fateful reply:

The earth is full of frivolous people, who are bending their whole force and the force of nations on trifles, and these are baptized with every grand and holy name, remaining, of course, totally inadequate to occupy any mind: and so skeptics are made. A true soul will disdain to be moved except by what natively commands it, though it should go sad and solitary in search of its master a thousand years.

Conway read the letter again and again.
This
was what commanded him:
this
was his master. He knew what he had to do. He resigned his post and bought a train ticket to Cambridge, Massachusetts—and to a new life at the Harvard Divinity School.

The elder Conway watched his son pack his books away for school with a baleful glare. "These books that you read and are now about to multiply affect my feeling as if you were giving yourself up to excessive brandy," his father said, growing visibly upset. "I cannot assist what appears to me grievous error."

And so his father turned his back on the son's new life: all the men in Moncure's family did. Only the women came to bid him a tearful farewell at the railway station. Even his own horse, as Moncure had ridden into Falmouth, was spooked and tried to leap into the Potomac. It was as if everything in his homeland was against him. Young Moncure, not yet even twenty years old, was a spiritual and physical exile—and as the locomotive belched smoke and embers in its northward path, he thought about meeting the minister whose words were now calling him up north. Before that fateful day reading the magazine essay by a roadside spring, Conway had never heard this minister's name before; and yet he now clung to his mysterious correspondent's letters like a lifeline, a rope pulling him into a new life. In his bag he kept a published volume of his Essays, and pondered finally meeting the man behind the letters upon its spine:
Emerson
.