The Invisible Line (29 page)

When the procession reached its destination, the groom stood with the bride, a teenage girl in a homespun dress, and they exchanged simple vows. Sometimes a preacher solemnized the wedding, but often the couple did without and jumped over a broomstick to signify their union, a custom shared by, among others, blacks across the South. The afternoon and evening passed with what one woman remembered as a “heap o' doin's”—feasting and games and dancing the Virginia reel, horse races through the woods for a whiskey bottle, and groups of young men and women tucking the bride and groom into bed. The next morning, after camping in the fields, the wedding party traveled back to the groom's house for the “infare,” a dinner where the entire community turned out to celebrate the marriage. They would gather again soon afterward to raise a cabin for the young couple.
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Mountain weddings bore traces of Elizabethan country life, as did the ballads people sang, even the words they spoke. In 1878 Jordan Spencer watched one of his boys marry a girl with a seventeenth-century Scottish name. Alafair Yates was all of fifteen when she decided she liked Jordan Spencer Jr. enough to accept his proposal. In many ways the wedding was typical, two teenagers reciting vows outside a log cabin, surrounded by hills and fields and forest in the early days of autumn. But their union bucked tradition in a crucial way. Alafair and Young Jordan married at his family's home, not hers. Her father did not approve of the union. Perhaps he felt she was too young, or that she deserved more than an illiterate farmer who offered a life of back-breaking labor. He never told his daughter his reasons. But neighbors suspected that Yates did not want his daughter marrying a black man.
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Relationships that blurred the color line had once been local matters, subject to whispers and rumors and occasional prosecution by local officials but also to tolerance. After the war, however, the phenomenon became part of a national political struggle and, accordingly, more abstract and dangerous. As the “White Man's Party,” the Democrats fixated on interracial sex, or
miscegenation
, a word an anti-Lincoln pamphleteer coined in 1864. Resistance to civil rights for newly freed people expressed itself through a vocabulary of sexual deviancy. The “degeneracy” of black women and the “depravity” of black men required laws separating and ordering the races and excused—even compelled—brutal force to maintain white supremacy. Race-related violence was repeatedly described as retribution for sexual transgressions, necessary to protect the purity of white womanhood. In the decade that followed the war, a black man or woman was lynched somewhere in Kentucky just about every two weeks.
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Right at this moment—just as traditions of local toleration confronted the mass politics of racial purity—Jordan and Malinda Spencer's children were reaching marrying age. Old Jordan's neighbors had accepted him at the poker table and stood up to Letcher Davis. Once again, however, they had occasion to classify the Spencers and consider whether they should remain on the white side of the line. Living near and working with the Spencers did not necessarily make it acceptable to marry them.

Although Dick Yates did not want his daughter marrying a Spencer, his objections remained a father's qualms and nothing more. Elsewhere in the South white fathers were threatening to kill or imprison the black men their daughters were marrying. But Dick Yates did not enlist the courts to void the marriage or prosecute Young Jordan, nor did anyone else in the county. Once the couple had exchanged vows, breaking up the union would have been just as damaging to Alafair as to Jordan, rendering her unmarriageable and dependent and potentially exposing her to prosecution too. As long as her husband remained white, she would be a respectable woman. Although lynch mobs constantly invoked the purity of white womanhood, it was also preserved by silence and accommodation.
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Other people had less trouble becoming kin to the Spencers. Among Rockhouse Creek families, Spencers married members of the Collins and Ratliff families, who were regarded as dark, but also Esteps and Blantons, who were not. Ben Franklin Spencer married a Hopson girl from John's Creek, several miles south of Paintsville; two members of another John's Creek family, the Seabolts, also married Spencers. When Dick Yates would not accompany his daughter to get the marriage certificate, one of the Seabolts helped Alafair with the paperwork. Given the choice between what they were hearing about racial purity and what they knew about the Spencers after living with them for a generation, most chose everyday experience over abstract ideas.
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Young Jordan and Alafair Spencer settled on Rockhouse, next to John Horn's farm. All his life Jordan had worked his father's fields—no schooling, no rest. Marriage freed him, if only to hire out his labor on other men's farms. Two of Young Jordan's sisters, Minerva and Sylvania, lived nearby with their babies and supported themselves as washerwomen. George, Jackson, and Ben were farmers in their own right, with children who would soon be old enough to push a plow.
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Although neighbors provided work and support for the Spencers, no one was more important than family. The Spencers might all gather for Sunday dinners. If one had a particular skill, like shoeing horses, he might shoe the horses of everyone in the extended family. At hog-killing time, when the weather got cold but before the creeks froze, the Spencer men might get together to slaughter and clean dozens of pigs. Family members nursed each other through illness and cooked and cleaned and cared for older nieces and nephews when babies were born. They spent more time talking with family than with anyone else. They spread news and gossip and advice first and foremost among themselves. They joked and dickered and debated and fought. And they came together in times of crisis, natural and man-made.
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With the children who remained at home, Old Jordan continued to make his crop. Even the ones who had left the Jordan Gap continued, in a way, to help their father. Their labor had created a working farm, income, and collateral—a basis for forming business ties with neighbors and merchants and claiming Jordan's status as a productive, equal, and white citizen. By marrying, they cemented his status. They gave him a white extended family, in-laws and cousins who had a direct stake in the Spencers' racial classification and would insulate and defend their Spencer kin from outside attack. Jordan and Malinda found their place in the vast tangle of local relations. As their children had children, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish the Spencers from everyone around them.

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE HOUSE WAS A fortress, a three-story brick cube with only the arch of the windows and the bare decoration below the roofline hinting at the “ample and somewhat gorgeous” rooms inside. Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war, had built the mansion in fashionable Franklin Square, five blocks from the White House. The president had visited often, usually waiting for Stanton in a carriage outside but occasionally venturing into the library, its high bookcases lined with volumes on military strategy and the laws of war.
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In the library on a winter evening, Randall Gibson sat and read by lamp and firelight. His forehead and heavy brow, fringed with a wave of hair, caught most of the light. A thick bristle of walrus whiskers separated his patrician nose from a proud chin, giving way to the barest gray hint of muttonchop. His blue eyes—and the dark rings beneath them—appeared enormous. Whenever Gibson entered the library, it was never far from his mind that this was where “Stanton lived + carried on all his devilment during the war and after.” The thought always cheered him up. A bare decade after Stanton had crushed the South with total war and Radical Reconstruction, Gibson was living in his house. His wife hosted elegant suppers in Stanton's dining room. Gibson's daughter and two boys ran up and down the hallways where Lincoln's secretary of war had paced. Federal troops no longer occupied the South. Former rebels had retaken the statehouses and legislatures. Democrats—Southerners, some three dozen of them Confederate generals—once again controlled the House of Representatives. Gibson was serving his second term in Congress. In early 1878 he was contemplating another run for reelection that fall. “Good Confederate likenesses” were now hanging on the walls of Stanton's library, mounted with a keen sense of irony by its new occupant. “When I am seated here,” Gibson wrote, “I cannot help but dwell upon the change—for the better.”
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There was a knock on the door, and Gibson's solitude was interrupted. A man walked in, a reporter for
The Washington Post
. The calming effect of a warm room on a cold night was lost on the reporter. He would remember his mood at that moment as “fluttering through the circumambient atmosphere,” jittery in anticipation of the interview to come. Gibson welcomed him inside. The man unfolded a copy of the day's
New York Times
and approached. The lead story on the front page described the College of Cardinals assembling in Rome to select a new pope—a matter not without interest to Gibson, who had embraced his wife's faith. But the reporter directed his eye to the story at the top of the far-left column, entitled “The Louisiana Officials.” “Look at this, Mr. Gibson,” he said. He shook the paper, in his words, “as a matador might shake a red rag in the face of a bull.”
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SIX YEARS EARLIER, when Grant won a second term as president, Gibson had despaired that “the day for our redemption is far distant ... I see no road of escape. I see no power to resist. We are undone.” Despite his foreboding the rise of Gibson's South had been remarkable, and Gibson had been instrumental in its triumph. He had arrived in Washington in the fall of 1875 ready to battle “the infernal Republicans, the hostile Party,” and help the newly elected Democrats to “get together and agree upon a Southern Policy—+ keep it to ourselves.” “It will not do for us to be merely counted as so many votes for this or that Northern aspirant,” he wrote. “We must be a power—behind the throne if need be.”
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While Gibson resolved to “hammer away” at “restor[ing] . . . our power + influence in and on the Government,” his blows had a gentle touch. Almost from the beginning, he relied on a lesson from his college days: a Southerner who could talk to Northerners would never want for influential friends. In Gibson's opinion, the “shallow, puritanical pretentious snob[s]” who dominated Washington “labor[ed] under the prejudice . . . that our culture is local, limited + provincial—+ not catholic nor cosmopolitan.” In the Yankee view, the “poor + benighted South” was the antithesis of the North, “the world of thought + culture + modern methods of investigation.” As a Yale man, a gentleman, and a professional, Gibson would never fail to confound expectations. Where Northerners were frustrated by resistance to their efforts to remake the South, Gibson appeared to be the kind of person who understood their concerns and could be trusted to fulfill their vision for a unified nation.
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Gibson's politics embraced a set of formal principles that in the abstract had natural appeal to the other side. While Republicans bristled at reports that white Southerners were unrepentant rebels, Gibson freely expressed relief that “the institution of slavery has been extirpated, root and branch, from the soil of my beloved State,” and he did not hesitate to campaign for black votes. “I thank God that to-day every man in my State is as free as I am,” Gibson declared, “and that the whole people is in the full enjoyment of equal political rights and privileges.” Gibson spent much of his first year in Congress focusing on issues that cut across sectional and party lines: commercial treaties with Hawaii and Brazil, funding for the New Orleans Mint, and the establishment of committees to consider national currency policy. The only reconstruction that seemed to matter to Gibson was the reconstruction of Mississippi River levees. According to one prominent Republican, Gibson staked his turf “on the side of law, order, justice, purity, and honor,” consciously invoking Republican rhetoric and values to the point that some Northerners imagined that he would switch political allegiances if only the Grand Old Party compromised on its Southern policy. When Gibson sought a congressional investigation of the New Orleans customhouse—a hotbed of Republican activism in Louisiana—the measure achieved unanimous consent.
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In what passed for social life in official Washington, Gibson and his family found themselves in high demand, even among people he might have regarded as enemies. No matter that their next-door neighbor was the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman—the Gibsons soon befriended the family of John Sherman, the longtime Ohio senator and newly appointed secretary of the treasury, who delighted in Gibson's “character as a man, the purity of his life, [and] the charm of his social intercourse.” Well read and well traveled, Gibson could speak thoughtfully about “almost every question of science, ethics, history and politics,” yet he did so with a restraint that had his companions hanging on every word. For someone who professed to dislike “puritanical” Northerners, Gibson never said “anything that might not be repeated in the family circle, or that would excite the reproaches of religious men and women.” Henry Adams's wife, a Boston Brahmin who sneered at what had become of the “tradition of Southern culture, voices, manners, etc. . . . in these post-bellum days,” pronounced Randall and Mary Gibson the worthiest of the Southerners in Washington, “better than any I have seen socially.” After dining with them at their house, Marian Adams described the congressman as “a quiet, gentlemanly, attractive man.” Visiting dignitaries came away from dinners describing Gibson as one of “the best politicians of the best class anywhere.”
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