The Invisible Line (13 page)

Because slavery had enormous market value—$2 billion at Phillips's count—its legitimacy as an institution naturally followed. “Before that amount of money,” he told the New Haven crowd, “the sanguine Yankee's imagination shrinks back.” Phillips combined his economic realism with a wickedly cynical assessment of the give-and-take of politics that precluded the adoption of an abolitionist agenda: “A politician serves God so far as that does not offend the Devil.”
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Phillips's pessimism about the present made his prescriptions for the future all the more radical. Only a true revolution could conquer slavery. “Make way or not,” he declared, “justice shall be done here between man and man!” If law and society stood in the way of freedom, then they had to be overthrown. “Men should obey their convictions of duty, without regard to laws and institutions,” he said. “Whether the institution is one thing or another, if it be unrighteous, let it be trampled under foot.” Let the South secede over slavery, he argued, for the economic reality would ruin them. “Sunder the Union, they could not exist, simply because they could not pay their bills. The free competition of the North would destroy them, as it supports them now.”
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Phillips's grounding in the economics of slavery and secession—his intuitive grasp of people's motivations in a capitalist world—heightened both the transgressive nature and the seeming rightness of his message. For Gibson, it was a thrilling mix of realism and radicalism, idealism and practicality. He wrote his father that Phillips was “not the man he is reputed to be. A more elegant, polished, scholarly gentleman you will not often find in the South . . . The extent and accuracy of his learning—classical & otherwise is truly wonderful and is only equaled by the ease & elegance with which he delivers himself in public.” Gibson remained a proslavery Southerner, but he could appreciate the right kind of opposing perspective. “Boston is a contemptible place and its citizens not much better,” he wrote, “but Wendell Phillips is a
splendid
orator and
perhaps
an honest man.”
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When Fitzhugh boarded the train south the following day, his hosts were convinced that after seeing New Haven in all its prosperity and listening to Phillips, the proslavery author had learned the error of his ways. “Fitzhugh was thunder-stricken,” wrote one abolitionist. “He had proved Free Society a failure without ever leaving his State; nobody replied to him, but he went home answered.” Yet Fitzhugh returned to Virginia more certain than ever that industrial capitalism and the free market brought temporary wealth and lasting misery, that “a change in the course of trade” would reveal the vanity and impermanence of New England's “fine towns and cities, her mighty factories, her great commerce, her palatial private residences, and her stores and warehouses filled with rich merchandise from every region.” Only the South produced “permanent and real” prosperity. If anything, his journey to New Haven convinced Fitzhugh that the slave trade should be revived and slavery extended to the territories.
⁴⁶

Hart Gibson was already looking forward to the next month's antislavery lecture at Brewster's Hall. It would feature Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator who insisted that “slavery ... is not mentioned in the Constitution” and denied that Congress had “any
power
to make a Slave or hunt a Slave.” Soon Hart would be reading law where Phillips and Sumner had studied. Then he might go to Europe, where his brother Randall was planning to travel. And finally he would settle at Hartland, his Kentucky estate. Once he did, he knew that he could no longer exist above the sectional crisis—the curiosity and independence of mind that so attracted his Northern classmates would become a liability. He would have to embrace his side and fight for it. He could already see that his older brother was losing his critical perspective. “It is a matter of small importance what New England may say or do—she is not the country,” Randall warned Hart. “She is but a patch on its surface—a ripple on the deep & wide expanding ocean of our . . . institutions.”

After just a couple of years in New Orleans, Randall wrote, “I find my opinions as decided as if I were a member of Congress.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act, so stridently opposed in New Haven for potentially expanding slavery beyond the South, was in Randall's view “the enumeration of a just and American principle,” an important counterbalance to violations of previous compromises by the North, which were “desecrat[ing] the Constitution” and committing “an unpardonable insult to the people of the South and of the territories.” If such views shocked his younger brother, Randall explained, “Y[ou]r opinion of the South + Southerners undergo a great change when you come among them. They are the greatest people on the face of the Earth.”
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T
HE ROCK DRAWINGS THAT gave Paint Creek its name were still visible when Jordan Spencer, Malinda Centers, and their children built their new home. When they moved one hundred miles through the mountains from Clay County to Johnson in the late 1840s, they found cliffs adorned with stark lines, some red and some black. The colors never mixed. Buffalo, deer, turkeys, panthers, and rattlesnakes: with each winter, each hard rain, and each gouge of a vandal's knife, the images faded into the sandstone.
¹

The signs that another people had once lived in the hills of Johnson County, Kentucky, were fleeting. In the course of any hard day, few had a spare second to think about the past. But just as the land itself influenced how people lived their lives—what they grew, hunted, built, talked about, prayed for, and dreamed of—the earlier inhabitants had quietly shaped the new settlers' worlds. Likely as not, when Jordan Spencer left his cabin for the three-mile journey to Paintsville, the Johnson County seat, he rode on Indian trails. Along the way, by Paint Creek, ancient burial mounds produced ceramic shards and arrowheads for burrowing animals and the occasional souvenir hunter.
²

Old men and women in the area had grown up hearing firsthand tales of encounters with Native Americans. Around the time of the Revolution, an Indian raiding party had held a pioneer woman named Jenny Wiley captive just a short walk from Jordan Spencer's cabin. After nearly a year she escaped south through the hills. In 1850 people were still telling Wiley's story. It was a tale of constant looming threat in the wilderness outside. The world beyond one's mountain hollow was full of things that could kill you or, just as bad, change you. Wiley had almost become an Indian, and it had taken every bit of her strength to return to her husband and remain white. Her escape route was now called Jenny's Creek.
³

The only thing Spencer painted was his hair. It was long and red, “straight but lay a little in waves,” a neighbor reported, “always combed down slick.” No one was fooled by the color for long. When Spencer was hot, his sweat ran red down his face. It was something that people tended to remember because Spencer spent most of his days sweating.
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Logging, farm labor, construction, in the hills or in town—Spencer worked grueling jobs. He was strong, proud, even ornery, earning him a reputation, by one neighbor's reckoning, as a “very active, keen man.” People noticed that he was “particular” about his appearance. He rode a fine horse; “when it galloped,” a great-grandson was told, “its legs just about went over its head.”
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Spencer was not trying to hide. What set him apart was plain to see. Decade after decade, local census-takers eyeballed the man or trusted the local lore and listed him as “mulatto.” At most, dyeing his hair seemed to turn his ancestry from something public, his race, into something private—his grooming habits. Neighbors might whisper or scratch their heads, but they did little else. In time his distinctive appearance seemed to fade into the surrounding fields and forests and mountainsides. Like the rock paintings and the burial mounds, it became something people knew was there but had stopped seeing.
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TORCHLIGHT CURLED AND STRETCHED in the curve of glass, as the quart bottle passed from one calloused hand to another. Under a starticked sky, it looked like the men were drinking flames. Silhouetted in front of them was a mound yards long and higher than their heads. It was not full of Indian treasure—just Indian corn.
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The Spencers' lives were made of corn. They grew it in fields so steep that they were best harvested, one of their great-grandsons would joke, by someone with “one leg shorter than the other.” Like everyone around them, they mortared corn into meal and baked and fried it into bread. They fed it to the cows and hogs they butchered for meat. Jordan drank corn that had been stilled into whiskey—a corncob made a handy stopper—and he and Malinda smoked tobacco through cobs hollowed out into pipe bowls. Across Appalachia, people sat on chair bottoms and children played with dolls woven from the husks. Piles of corncobs were put by the privy for people to keep themselves clean.
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At harvesttime, the mountains were amber and red; spectral cornstalks, hacked low and stripped of leaves, studded the hillsides. Families—men, women, and children—piled their crop in barns and level clearings and invited neighbors to help them shuck and crib the corn. After long days working in their own fields, they came late in the afternoon and worked through sunset and moonrise into the night.
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Burning with long pulls of liquor, fueled by outdoor feasts cooked in wash kettles over open fires, men divided into teams and vied to see who could shuck the most corn the fastest. A corn shucking, or husking bee, was an autumn ritual across the South, from tidewater to mountains. In plantation country, slaves from miles around had permission to attend, and shucking became a working holiday, a ritual performance of singing and taunting and joking that made fun of the masters even as they watched. In the hills there were no spectators, and it was hard to tell in the shadow of night what social distinctions might exist between neighbors.
¹⁰

A husking might start slowly, men drinking and chewing tobacco and trading tales, but the roar of competition soon took over. Clouds of dust enveloped the teams as they tore through their piles of corn, and amid accusations of cheating, neighbors often found themselves pummeling each other fist to skull. A fiddler might reel for the boys and girls of courting age, as couples walked away from the lantern light or rejoined the party. After tending the feast, women might work on a quilt; as the night grew darker, they told stories about haints and, according to one observer, “discuss[ed] the signs which, to them, betokened the near approach of the end of the world.”
¹¹

In the summer of 1854, after a few years of living and working on other people's land, Jordan Spencer bought several hundred acres of his own. The land was just west of Jenny's Creek, extending from the Colvin Branch of Barnett's Creek over to Rockhouse Creek and spanning the ridgeline between them. It rose along steep banks to rocky knobs of mountain, broken by a low gap that could be crossed by foot or on horse or mule, a convenient path into town for people deeper in the hills. The property was a forest of black oak, buckeye, beech, dogwood, and poplar. Spencer bought it from a man who changed the color of skin for a living—a tanner, Lewis Todd. Sallow rawhides became mellow browns and reds with chestnut and hickory tanbark from trees on the land. Spencer probably used the bark to dye his hair.
¹²

Jordan and Malinda Spencer cleared their land of trees and thicket—the boys, at nine and seven, were old enough to help—split and hoisted fence rails, and broke the hillsides to plant their crop. The boundaries of the Spencers' land ebbed and flowed with its contours, giving the family a community's worth of neighbors. The Spencers would need them to help raise a cabin and shuck their corn. They employed and worked alongside Jordan and traded land and livestock and equipment. They ate and visited with the family regularly and found Malinda to be generous and hospitable—in their words, “clever.”
¹³

The men along Rockhouse got drunk with Jordan on Saturday nights and prayed with him at church on Sunday. The women would help Malinda through more than twenty years of childbirths and mourned the deaths of at least two babies from scarlet fever. George Washington and Andrew Jackson Spencer were soon joined by Benjamin Franklin, Christopher Columbus, and James Madison. By 1858 the Spencers had either run out of favorite historical figures or felt established enough in the world to name their next-born son Jordan Jr. By decade's end their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, had two new sisters, Sylvania and Polley Ann.
¹⁴

Owning land made the Spencers stand out, but it also enabled the family to blend in. The mere fact of ownership signaled to their neighbors that they were capable of rising in the world and had gained enough acceptance to find someone willing to sell to them. The difficulty of mountain life guaranteed not only that the Spencers would rely on their neighbors but also that their neighbors would come to rely on them. With every cabin raised, every child born, and every ear shucked, it made less sense to ask whether the Spencers were different. By staying in one place, they were creating a cocoon of everyday experience—conversations and business deals and exchanges and debts—strong enough to shut out the rest of the world. In time they became part of the landscape. The farm became known as Spencer's farm. The low gap through the hills—the pass through the land—was the Jordan Gap.