The Invisible Line (22 page)

In the fall of 1865, Wall was discovering that former slaves took little comfort in their contracts, and that former masters refused to accept that they were now living in a free society. The Union victory, coupled with presidential orders and amnesties that seemed to restore former Confederates to power, made the people Wall called “sympering Rebs” more defiant than ever. “Among nine-tenths of the people . . . there is not Union feeling enough to save their souls from perdition,” wrote a Union officer in South Carolina that November. “They are full of the bitterest kind of secession feeling, talk about the d—d nigger, the d—d Yankee, & speak of the Yankee Gov't . . as if they . . . still belonged to the Confederacy, having no interest or wish in relation to the common good of our country.” In December the South Carolina legislature passed a code that forced blacks to make yearlong contracts with white “masters,” set the hours of labor from sunup to sundown, forbade workers to leave their plantations, and subjected them to whippings for misconduct. The Union general in charge of the occupation of South Carolina declared the code “null and void,” but whites were openly expressing their wish to restore slavery in all but name and were acting accordingly.
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What Wall called “the Law of Congress and Policy of the Government” was committed unambiguously to freedom and equality for all, but the Freedmen's Bureau officer learned that changes in the law did not translate neatly into changes in society. Delegations of freedpeople from the interior regularly appeared at Wall's office with stories of lynchings and other suspicious killings, but Wall did not have to leave Charleston to find unfairness, prejudice, and brutality. In Wall's estimation, the city's police were little more than “ex-Rebs” who had “all the hatred they ever had still toward the free negro and the government”; they openly started “rows” and committed “outrages” upon the city's colored people. He spent a morning attending the proceedings in the provost marshal's misdemeanor court, watching helplessly as young blacks were subjected to humiliating punishments for trivial offenses—stripped naked and dragged into the streets “amid the shouts and laughter of the vulgar crowd.”
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Understaffed and underfunded, Wall relied on private charitable societies such as the American Missionary Association to provide crucial services, such as educating black children, and to pressure Congress to maintain its commitment to the freed men and women of the South. In late November 1865 his wife, Amanda, arrived in Charleston and immediately found herself in a packed classroom teaching dozens of students. Even as the Walls embraced the work of the charitable societies, they felt keenly the casual inequality that pervaded even the most righteous groups. Amanda Wall threw herself into her work and was thrilled by her students' excitement for learning, but the American Missionary Association was paying her less than what they paid other Northern teachers. “I wish to do all the good I can among these poor Freed people,” she protested to the head of the association, “but in my circumstance I do not think gratuitous teaching is required of me as to accept less than others get who do precisely the same work.”
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As 1865 became 1866 Wall watched the promise of freedom and equality fade. Week after week the “commotion & confusion” continued. Blacks complained to him of whites who refused to pay them for honest work. He reluctantly concluded that “whites are not disposed to deal fairly by [freedpeople] but will if forced to.” In Washington, however, politicians from the president down seemed indisposed to force white Southerners to do anything. Some of his worst enemies, Wall found, were the “Negro hating union officers (and a majority of them are so)” in the force that was occupying Charleston, men who belittled his authority, battled him for jurisdiction over disputes between whites and blacks, and attempted to take over Freedmen's Bureau buildings, including schools. In January, after white South Carolinians and local army officers had protested for months about Rufus Saxton, Wall's hero was relieved of his Freedmen's Bureau command.
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That same month a former slave approached Wall with a depressingly familiar tale. He sold wood to make a living, but recently a white man had taken a load from him without paying. Wall figured out who the man was. Even though the man was rich and well connected, Wall summoned him to appear at the Freedmen's Bureau office, sending an armed guard to deliver the order and escort him back. In front of Wall, the man agreed to pay what he owed and said that he found the settlement fair. But a friend of his, a Philadelphia merchant who had made a fortune supplying boats to the Union navy but was nonetheless a “
rank copperhead
,” complained to the Union army's post commander in Charleston “that it was too bad to have a nigger arrest a gentleman.” The commander promptly had Wall arrested.
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Sitting in jail for the second time in his life, Wall contemplated the limits of the law. Congress supported his agency and its mission. The Bureau had put him in charge of freedpeople's affairs in Charleston. The law had given him an enormous task. But to the Union army commander, he was a “damned nigger captain,” fit only to be snubbed and abused. Appealing to his allies in Washington, Wall vowed to fight on. “We are in Egypt in more senses than one,” he wrote, “but we shall still try to do our duty, obeying the orders of our superiors and fearing only God.” The law was on Wall's side. But he realized that the freedpeople needed political support, money, and soldiers of their own, and that the Republic would never truly serve them until they had the vote. To serve the righteous cause, Wall needed more than a title and a responsibility, more than the sanction of law. He needed power.
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T
HE STEAMER GLIDED THROUGH the cold night, every bend in the river a gentle turn, Louisiana starboard, Mississippi portside, New Orleans just a day ahead. The clean rushing air muffled the churn of engines and smoke. As children, Randall and Hart Gibson had made the journey downriver dozens of times. Though the
W. R. Carter
was one of the newest additions to the Atlantic & Mississippi Steamship fleet, the voyage took the brothers back to more innocent days. It was an island of calm in a troubled world.

The previous May Randall had surrendered his army, relinquished his cause, and fallen in the world. He was no longer a general. Once again he was a failed planter who had studied law. Louisiana was a place of “pinched poverty,” its daily life and politics in chaos. “There is no money in the Country,” Randall reported to his younger sister Louly, “no sugar, or cotton, or tobacco, or rice—nothing to sell.” The Gibsons' plantations were on the brink of failure, flooded from levee breaks and stymied by the transition to free labor. “Most of the negroes have gone off—Father having lost his crops has not the money to hire them,” Randall wrote. “We will have enough left I hope to raise corn.”
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Randall retired to Terrebonne Parish and spent six months depressed and alone, waiting for a pardon from President Johnson and doing little more than thumbing through the books in his father's library—novels, old legal treatises, and the writings of Washington and Jefferson. He declared that “it is a calm, steady persevering patience that is sure to win the fight & carry you through to success in anything,” but there were days when it seemed impossible to imagine a future for himself in Terrebonne or anywhere else in the United States. He sent a set of “interrogatories” to M. S. McSwain, asking the former Confederate what life was like for him and the dozens of other Southerners who had moved after the surrender to Paranagua, Brazil, below São Paulo. Although McSwain wrote back extolling cheap lands “that resemble those on Bayou Teche” and saying that sugar grew “larger and much sweeter than Louisiana cane, without any cultivation at all,” Gibson remained on his father's settee. He was thirty-three years old, and his life was finished.
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When winter came, Randall visited his sisters and brothers in Kentucky. Everyone was in dire financial straits—and his brother McKinley's “hacking cough and hectic flush” suggested “a doomed case of consumption”—but the visit lifted Randall's spirits and “kindled anew my resolutions,” he wrote. “It has braced me—for the good fight.” Randall and one of his cousins talked about opening a law practice together in New Orleans. And when it was time to return home, Hart, whose lands had been confiscated during the war, agreed to join Randall on the voyage back down to sugar country. They rode to Louisville to buy passage to New Orleans, bringing with them a herd of mules for the plantations.
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The journey would take about a week. After a couple of days on the Ohio, the
W. R. Carter
was steaming through the ruins of the Confederacy. On either side of the river, cotton fields were overgrown or flooded. Much of the land that was in cultivation had been confiscated and sold to Northern business interests or, worse, given over to former slaves. Despite the vistas afforded from the decks, the atmosphere on board was cheery. On walks around the boat, at meals, and through hours of reading and leisure, the Gibson brothers found themselves among friends. The passenger list included people they knew from Kentucky and Louisiana, “exceedingly demonstrative” newlyweds, doctors and lawyers and planters, the Confederate brigadier generals Samuel Ferguson and Richard Montgomery Gano, and the wife and three children of the New Orleans physician Tobias Gibson Richardson, named for their father. Everyone was equal, still mourning the loss of friends and sons and brothers, a country and their comfortable place in it. Together they could forget for just a moment the pain and indignity of the previous year. The trip became a floating party, like a weekend gathering on a Kentucky estate before the war.
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Days passed “full of gaiety and hope,” conversation, and laughter. The ladies on board were “banging away and singing on the Piano—‘The sea, the deep sounding sea,' horrible music!” Randall wrote. It had been years since he had experienced such simple joy. “We are a curious people—our Countrypeople!” he mused. “They are just as much at home on this boat as if it belonged to them—not the slightest ceremony is observed and yet great candour and kindness mark their intercourse.”
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On February 2, as the steamer approached Vicksburg and the ancestral “Gibson neighborhood,” Randall could barely sleep. He stayed up until midnight talking with an old friend and then awoke in his stateroom at half past two. Hart was also awake, so they chatted until three. Randall “concluded to make one more effort to sleep,” and his brother went outside to smoke. Randall shut his eyes and drifted off. He was returning to Louisiana actually looking forward to the days ahead. “I forecast the future in such cheering colours,” he had written Louly from the boat. “I think how energetic and industrious I am going to be, how soon our affairs shall be restored to their wonted prosperity.”
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Just an hour later Randall was jolted from bed, gasping for air. The doors, windows, and floor planks of his room burst apart in a “tremendous explosion,” and the room filled with “scalding steam.” The ship's massive boilers had blown, and with “wonderful rapidity,” Randall observed, “the flames swallowed up everybody and everything.” Suffocating and blind in the “intense smoke and darkness,” Randall “made a desperate lunge” to get outside. He could hear nothing but screaming. Two men rushed past him, calling for him to join them as they leaped off the deck. Randall hesitated, and for a moment “a gust of wind blew the steam and smoke aside.” To his horror, Randall saw that the men had not jumped overboard—instead they had fallen “into a crater, where many others were vainly struggling, but being rapidly burned to death. They had jumped right on the redhot boiler.” Randall lost his footing but grabbed a rope and swung past what he called the “devouring crater of flames.” “I thought the spectacle surpassed any description of Hades I had ever read or seen,” he later wrote. “The cries of desperation, of despair . . . were heart-rending.” It was worse than what he had seen at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Spanish Fort.
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Just past the crater, a fellow passenger grabbed Randall, yelled, “Is that you, General? God bless you!” and pulled him to the edge of what remained of the ship. With flames at his back, Randall plunged into the Mississippi. In a river “so cold that it burned like fire,” pulled by its “irresistible” current, Randall grabbed at a bobbing cotton bale. Although it was four in the morning, the inferno cast a great light that could be seen miles away. Dozens of burning and drowning men and women were shrieking for help, as a deadly barrage of bolts, bars, stovepipes, and planks pierced air and water. Randall saw a half-submerged lifeboat. As he swam toward it, he saw it was holding four scalded men. Randall climbed in, bailed the boat out, and fought the current with a stray plank. Slowly the boat made its way to shore, but it was taking on water. For half an hour Randall paddled as hard as he could, trying to get close enough to the shore that no one would drown when the lifeboat sank. When they finally abandoned the boat, there were roots to grab on to, and people on land soon pulled them to safety.
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Soaking wet, dressed only in a flannel nightshirt, Randall watched the
W. R. Carter
burn to the waterline. Everything was gone—clothes, money, watches. He could not find his brother. One instant all had been pleasant, and he could see the path clear to prosperity and happiness. The next, everything was “blown to atoms.” “It was like the explosion of a mine, or a stroke of lightning,” he thought, “so sudden, so instantaneous, so destructive.” There was nothing he could have done—“not by individual effort or agency,” he wrote—to stop what had happened or help a single soul. Was he at the mercy of “Providential interposition” or the cold laws of “accident”?
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