The President's Daughter (52 page)

“I just know there're some Hemingses crossing over those lines, taking their contraband asses to freedom. I just know it,” said Thenia.

“There's an old Chinese curse Thor told me the other day—'May you be granted your fondest desire.' “

I had my “fondest desire.” Thomas Jefferson's precious Old South was torn to shreds. It lay there in the streets of Philadelphia, while the Irish and the Swedes and the Poles and the Germans danced all over it. We were being led into war by a backwoods lawyer of dubious pedigree on the basis of my father's own Declaration. My proud Virginia cousins had taken the final step to their own annihilation. I should have felt exhilarated, but instead a strange lethargy hung about my soul and a cold loneliness invaded my heart. My husband, my sons, my friends, my employees, even Thenia were all shut out of this . . . this despair, which was also happiness. I couldn't explain it to myself and I couldn't explain it to Thenia, who was filled with pure joy at
the possibility of killing southerners, nor to Thor, who was tortured by visions of carnage and destruction beyond any conceivable measure and any previous war.

People at the warehouse and the laboratory sometimes stopped speaking about the war when I entered. I knew why. Despite my reputation as a Black Republican, a Free Soiler, a Unitarian, and an abolitionist, I was in their eyes a Virginian. It was assumed my secret sympathies were with the Confederacy. I was completely alone.

The Almighty has no attributes which can take sides with us in such a contest.

Thomas Jefferson

New red-white-and-blue bunting had been draped over the cast-iron colonnade of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore railroad station in August 1862. Steam from the black, snout-nosed engines hovered under the cast-iron-and-glass cupola, which filtered the sunlight through its tight grid of sandblasted panes into a torrid yellow mist. It swirled in clouds around the shouting, striving crowds, or rose in tiers from the great engine wheels and smokestacks. The tinted glass, the thick smoke turned everyone sepia, leaving only the stark blackness of the locomotives, heavy and puffing in their exertion like sacrificial bulls.

The station was like the city: transient, noisy, dangerous. Newly recruited soldiers from New England, New York, and New Jersey thronged into troop transports that would carry them south.

Sinclair and Raphael were already gone. The twins were about to join their cavalry regiment in Baltimore, and would soon be incorporated into the Army of the Potomac. They hadn't consulted me on their enlistment, but after the disastrous campaigns waged by Generals McClellan and Pope in the first year of the war, the President had requested three hundred thousand more volunteers—over the initial million recruits. Madison and James had answered the President's call to defend the cause of the Union.

Beverly and Thor were all that were left of my men, and they too were due to leave. Beverly had already volunteered and was waiting for his commission as an army M.D., and Thor was assigned to Washington as a
liaison officer between the army medical corps and the United States Sanitary Commission. Soon I would run the Wellington Drug Company alone.

In the far corner of the shed, an army band played “John Brown's Body,” which had been transformed by a woman named Julia Ward Howe into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In one night, according to legend, Mrs. Howe had turned a folk hero's music into a Republican hymn because God had whispered the words in her ear. It had swept the North like wildfire, catching the temper of the time, the awesomeness of the moment. It had become a marching song, a dirge, a ballad, an aria, a barcarolle, a serenade. Men and women sang it as a spiritual, an oratorio, a berceuse, a lullaby, a prayer.

Soldiers adapted it in the field, women crooned it to orphans, and bands and orchestras, harmonicas and bugles trumpeted it as the soul music of the Union. Everyone now knew the words by heart as they wafted over the hissing and coughing of the black engines.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,

He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,

His truth is marching on. . . .

No one spoke of the ninety-day war anymore. Lincoln's army was riddled with jealousies and indecisions amongst its commanders, and fear of the superiority of the Confederate forces. The indisputable numerical, industrial, and logistical strength of the North had not produced a decisive victory. People spoke of lack of leadership, of unpreparedness in the ranks, of confusion and mismanagement in the command, but everyone knew the real reason: the confusion over slavery.

To entice the secessionist states back and to keep the border states in the Union, the President claimed the war had nothing to do with slavery. That to save the Union he would free all of the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. But slavery wouldn't stay out of the war. From the first moment the first slave emancipated himself by escaping over the lines to the Union to become enemy contraband, the war had become a war about us.

From a distance, I watched my twins saying good-bye to their sweethearts in the presence of the girls' mothers. The boys were dark-haired and dark-eyed, with long legs and wide shoulders that looked dashing in their new, Philadelphia-made, blue-and-gray uniforms. Even though they were joining their company by train, they wore both the spurs and sabers of their cavalry
regiment, the Twenty-fourth. Yet they were awkward with their weapons of war, like children playing games. But this was no game. Their voices drifted over to where I stood, despite all the noise of a thousand other leave-takings. The train hissed and pawed the ground like an impatient war-horse, and the girls tied homemade sashes around the boys' waists and stuck hand-embroidered handkerchiefs in their pockets as if indeed this were just a game. But the game had already claimed fifty thousand lives.

“Did you know that the French general Lafayette once said that had he known at the time that he had come to the aid of slavery, he would never have drawn his sword in defense of the United States?”

The precise, French-accented voice of Maurice Meillasoux always took me back decades. At the beginning of the war, a strange envoy from my past had shown up and become part of our household: Maurice, the grandnephew of Adrian Petit, had arrived in Philadelphia, much as Lafayette had almost a hundred years ago, to join the Union army, take on its fight, and live to brag about it. Maurice had traveled in the West and in the South before his arrival in Philadelphia. After reading Sinclair's letters about how boring the navy was, he had decided to join one of General Fremont's regiments—many of which were composed of free-thinking Germans, passionate antislavers, in Missouri—and was waiting for his orders to move out.

“At least, dear Maurice, you know for whom you're fighting.” I smiled.

“What amazes me is that anyone can believe that this war can be fought as if slavery were a detail. A rebellion sustained by slavery in defense of slavery can only be suppressed by moving against slavery.”

“I cannot agree more,” said Thor, resplendent in his new brigadier general's dress uniform, which he had donned in homage to the twins' departure. “To fight slaveholders without fighting slavery is worse than a halfhearted business.”

“And what about not allowing black men to enlist?” replied Maurice. “Let the black man get the brass letters of the U.S. on his chest: let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and a bullet in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship. They would probably fight harder than the white northerner!”

“That's just the point, my dear. Lincoln cannot ask white men to fight for the Negro, or there'd be insurrection in the ranks—total anarchy. They just won't do it.” I shook my head sadly.

“I don't believe that,” said Maurice. “First of all, I believe it is a military necessity both in the North and the South to use black men to fight, and second, if leadership comes from the White House, the man in the street will see the justice of it and follow.”

“Cabinet members Cameron, Chase, and Blair agree with you,” Thor added. “They're branded radicals.”

“They see what is necessary,” continued Maurice. “It is one thing to drive the Rebels from the south bank of the Potomac or even to occupy Richmond. It is another to secure and hold in permanent subjugation a tract of country nearly as large as Russia, seven-hundred-fifty thousand miles square and twice the size of the original United States. Napoléon couldn't do it any more than King George the Third could!”

“An argument of military necessity must be developed. Southerners boast that slavery is a pillar of strength to the Confederacy since it allowed her to place in the field a force so much greater in proportion to her population. Slaves constitute more than half the labor force; they raise the food for the army; they build its fortifications; they haul the supplies; they repair the railroad lines; they work in mines and munitions—the South drafted slaves into service before they began drafting white men as soldiers.”

“The very stomach of said rebellion is the Negro in the form of a slave. Believe me, arrest that hoe in the hands of the Negro, and you kill the rebellion in the very seat of its life.”

“While in theory this is a domestic insurrection, in practice this is war— Lincoln has already admitted it by proclaiming a blockade and treating rebel soldiers as prisoners of war. Confiscating enemy property is a military action. Slaves are property? Fine. Ben Butler did it back in May 1861 at Fortress Morse—he refused to return three escaped slaves to a Confederate colonel who cited the Fugitive Slave Law because, since Virginia was no longer in the Union, the Fugitive Slave Law no longer applied,” reasoned Maurice.

“What about the border states?” continued Thor.

“Damn the border states. A thousand Lincolns cannot stop the people from fighting slavery,” said Maurice as he flashed a smile. “Secretary of the Treasury Chase wants us not only to free the contrabands but to arm them. And Secretary of War Cameron backs him up.”

“Take their damn property. That, dear Harriet, is abolition in action. Emancipation is a means to victory, not an end in itself. I have no hobby of my own with regard to the Negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his slavery . . . but war is on their side.”

The two men smiled and glanced over at the twins, who were free, white, and twenty-one and didn't care about anything except fighting.

A lifetime of change had been compressed into the past year. The slaves
themselves continued to convert themselves into contraband. I glanced at Thor, who was still in deep conversation with Maurice. Contraband was a good name for what I was—Father's unidentified, “lost” merchandise, fallen off the wagon in Philadelphia. Contraband.

A train whistle blew, and the troops and officers milling around the platform began to board the trains. The band began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Madison and James moved toward me, their fiancées and the girls' mothers trailing behind them in balloons of white lace, white silk. Skirts had become so wide that almost six feet surrounded each female, and we all resembled galleons or watermelons, depending on one's point of view. We were impossible to transport, impossible to set at a table, impossible to undress. The women, like a flock of multicolored swans, approached. There was only small talk now, and the dreaded last minutes before the good-byes had to be said. There was no more talk about slavery or military necessity; there was only women's fear, badly concealed, and the irrational war fever of the young. Why did young men find war so beautiful?

“Mother,” whispered Madison, at the very last moment, “your blessing?”

“God bless you, my darling. And God keep you. Come home to me.”

“But of course,” he laughed. “We'll have those Rebs licked before June.”

“June! Why, there's no Mississippi Valley left, and McClellan's army of one hundred thousand can hear Richmond's churchbells. With us coming, there are one hundred thirty-five thousand men closing in on Jeff Davis's Richmond. Why, Richmond's doomed by the first of May!”

“That is where you're from, is it not, Mrs. Wellington?” The cool northern voice fell like new-blown snow on my shoulder.

“Yes, it is,” I said, praying I'd have to say no more.

“It must be a terrible conflict for you ... as a southerner.”

“There's no conflict between one's country on one hand and traitors on the other,” I replied coolly. “When the South frees its slaves and returns to the Union, then I'll consider myself a southerner.”

But what cold agony and fury invaded my soul as I watched James and Madison swing their long, graceful bodies into the passenger wagon and watched my future daughters-in-laws' handkerchiefs flutter, my husband's breath catch in his throat at their leaving, and Maurice's light laughter ring after the last good-byes.

“Leave a few Rebs for the French,” he shouted, “before the British recognize the whole lot of them and try to take back their colony.”

For the first time since the war began, Charlotte, Emily, and I agreed on something. We joined the United States Sanitary Commission as nurses. Charlotte had dreams of us becoming the North's Florence Nightingales; Emily and I agreed that our work with fugitive slaves was futile, as they only had to cross over the Union lines and be “confiscated.” And although Thenia, as a midwife and apothecary, was the most qualified nurse of us all, she was accepted by the Sanitary Commission's recruiter only as a laundress.

“But she's an apothecary and a midwife,” I protested.

“I'm sorry, ma'am, but I've got my orders. Cleaning and laundry's all nigger women are allowed to do. No nursing.”