The President's Daughter (54 page)

“Women are going in for novel-writing with a vengeance. I think there is a great future for the new generation in that: all those husbandless
ba-cheliéres
taking up their pens,” she often said.

Charlotte loved her because Sarah had set herself up as an editorial voice for women's rights, while Charlotte had only flirted with the idea. Sarah wrote a monthly column called “Editor's Table,” where she gave advice and crusaded for a better world for women and children. No topic was too
controversial for her to take on, including political candidates (even though women couldn't vote), the federal government, slavery and abolition, women's suffrage, child care and nutrition, child labor and factory conditions, and hospices for the poor and elderly.

Sarah was a huge success. She had an opinion on everything, and
Godey's
had become the American woman's bible, with one hundred thousand subscribers. Charlotte and I took to the habit of dropping into Sarah's publishing offices in the late afternoon once a week to take her to tea at Brown's Hotel, which was just across the square. In Brown's, we would discuss everything and anything, from the cut of a Parisian sleeve to the progress of the Indian Wars in Wyoming to the opera news from Europe to President Lincoln's new disaster in Washington. Sarah had ideas on equality, temperance, unwed mothers, social security, unions and the labor movement, treasury bonds, slum landlords, and even my father.

The book Sarah handed me across our table at Brown's was bound in white paper and had the illustration of a young girl tottering on the railing of a bridge with angry, frothy waters below waiting for her leap. I looked at the title. It was called
Clotel, or the President's Daughter.

“It's the newest antislavery romance from London,” said Sarah. “The publisher sent it to me to serialize, but the story seems too farfetched for me. It's about Thomas Jefferson's slave children. It was written by a fugitive slave, William Wells Brown, and has been very highly received in London. If you like slave narratives, you'll love this one,” she added. Her lilac eyes held mine, but I could read nothing in them except what I had always read. She didn't know; she wouldn't know. She couldn't have guessed.

“I wrote Mr. Wells that I thought some editorial changes ought to be made for the American readers—after all, this is a rumor that has been around for some time. The American version, since we already know the story, doesn't need so much explanation, just action. Let me know what you think of it.”

I took the book home with me and read it straight through, separating the folded, uncut pages into which European books were bound, I thought, in great poetic justice, with James's stiletto.

But God by His Providence had otherwise determined. He had determined that an appalling tragedy should be enacted that night within plain sight of the President's house. But as the pursuers crossed the high drain for the passage of sloops, they beheld three men slowly approaching from the Virginia side. They called on
them to arrest the fugitive, whom they proclaimed a runaway slave. As she came near, they formed a line across the narrow bridge, and prepared to seize her. For a moment she looked wildly and anxiously around. On either hand, far below, rolled the deep foaming waters of the Potomac, and before and behind the rapidly approaching step and noisy voices of pursuers, showing how vain would be any further effort for freedom. Her resolution was taken. She clasped her hands convulsively and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes towards heaven, and then, with a single bound, she vaulted over the railings of the bridge and sank forever beneath the waves of the river!

Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States. The body of Clotel was picked up from the bank of the river where it had been washed by the strong current, a hole dug in the sand, and there deposited. Such was the life and death of a woman whose virtues and goodness of heart would have done honor to one in a higher station of life, who, if she had been born in any other land but that of slavery, would have been honored and loved.

I sat reading my “biography” with an eerie feeling of jubilation, turning the pages with my blank fingers. How dead was I? I shivered. I felt cold, as if I really had jumped into the ice-clad Potomac and drowned. Hadn't I drowned? Wasn't I dead? Hadn't I chosen oblivion rather than slavery? The fictitious life of Harriet Hemings, written by a fugitive slave, had been read by millions of Englishmen and Sarah might now serialize it as antislavery propaganda.
Clotel, or the President's Daughter.
What else could I wish for? It was even better than my station on the railroad, and that made me laugh.

“Mother, what are you reading? Another antislavery tract from London?” It was Maria who stuck her head over my shoulder.

“No,
Uncle Tom's Cabin.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“I always laugh when I read
Uncle Tom's Cabin.”

For weeks I left
Clotel
lying around ostentatiously on tables, shelves, mantelpieces. Sometimes I left it open, sometimes closed. But no one picked it up or even glanced at it. Finally I gave it to Thenia, and she never returned it.

Sarah decided against publishing
Clotel.
Having found a new American romance about slavery written by a free black doctor, Martin Delany, who had graduated from Harvard in
1852,
she published that instead.

The red, white, and blue bunting of the spring of 1861 faded and fell in shreds. The ninety days came and went, as did the musical chairs of generals in Washington. The war's summer campaign wilted.

On the Fourth of July of that second year, the President affirmed yet again that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it existed and that since the Constitution protected slavery, he would vow to preserve the Constitution and the Union. Even those who hoped the war would destroy slavery held their peace.

“Give him time,” said none other than Robert Purvis. “Let us stand still and see the salvation of God rather than add anything to the general commotion.” Purvis was sitting in my office at the warehouse, having not found me at the Protection Bureau. The hot, humid Philadelphia summer was upon us, and Robert sat fanning himself with his straw hat.

“ ‘The general commotion,' “ I said. “This is lethal war, Robert. Lincoln has crossed the Rubicon. Total victory is his only chance now.”

“Not yet, my dear Harriet, he hasn't yet touched slavery. The South can still come back.”

“You mean back down? Never. Their honor is at stake. I know them.”

“Congress has authorized another million men, Harriet, for a three-year tour of duty or the duration of the war. A million men, Harriet. Lincoln isn't joking. A million men are all the South's got.”

“They have their slaves, Robert. They can send every able-bodied white man in Robert E. Lee's Army of North Virginia against McClellan's Army of the Potomac. While their slaves reap and sow, harvest, dig, build, march, cook, and fortify.” To my fury and despair, Jeb Stuart's cavalry had captured five thousand cases of Wellington ether off a steamship cargo at Harrison's Landing, Virginia.

That August, the Union fought and lost the Second Battle of Bull Run, thirteen months after the first. Confederate troops were not twenty miles from Washington. The Rebel lines were advancing in Missouri and Kentucky. Cincinnati was in danger. Stonewall Jackson was about to invade Maryland with forty thousand men. Disgust with Lincoln was universal.

“This is not a war,” fumed Emily, “this is a rout.”

“God damn them, stealing my ether.”

“How can Lee fight?” said Sarah. “He has an army of fifty-five thousand sick, hungry, exhausted men, subsisting on green corn, marching on bare feet, with stragglers falling by the wayside in the thousands.”

“They have to come,” I said. “They have to take the war north while they have the momentum of their victory at Bull Run.”

“No one understands why McClellan, having created a powerful northern army, has never committed it to all-out battle,” said Charlotte.

But I knew why. He didn't think he could beat the Virginians. This was our low-water mark and Robert E. Lee knew it. We held our breath to see if Lee's crossing the Mason-Dixon line into Maryland could force the despised, desperate Lincoln government to sue for peace.

The South would call the battle Sharpsburg after the small town there, and the North would call it Antietam after the creek that ran through the battlefield. But whatever it was named by either side, it was called war.

ANTIETAM, MARYLAND
SEPTEMBER
17
TH
,
1862

Mother,

I have already heard what is known as the rebel's yell enough times so that it barely bothers me anymore. This unearthly wail travels with the Rebs wherever they go and strikes fear in the hearts of those who hear it for the first time and possibly every time thereafter, for there is nothing like it this side of the Infernal, and the peculiar cockcrow sensation it sends down your backbone at such a time can never be explained. You have to feel it.

How such men as the Rebel troops can fight on as they do, filthy, sick, hungry, and miserable as they are, and that they should prove such heroes in combat is past explanation. But watching men in battle, dressing them, caring for them, and sometimes fighting myself, I realize that war transforms and transcends men in ways beyond rational thought. We on the Union side are bound to expunge the dishonor of all our terrible defeats. The shame of still another whipping is not to be borne. I had heard all through the war that the army was eager to do battle with the enemy (a sentiment confirmed by the
New York Times's
editorial page). But when you come to hunt for this sentiment among soldiers, it is always some other regiment that has it. The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree trunks and solid shot is cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get
out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning tail, there occurs a predicament of exceptional awkwardness. I am honored to report that our regiment didn't falter as we marched slowly forward, in formation, our rifles held at firing position. In a second the air was full of the kiss of bullets and the hurtle of grapeshot. The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the autobiography of Goethe on a similar occasion—the whole landscape turned red. I will never forget that moment; men were loading and firing with demoniacal fury, and shouting and laughing hysterically. Fightin' Joe Hooker's Union First Corps led the attack, sweeping down the Hagerstown Pike from the north. The Rebs were waiting for him in the cornfield. From five o'clock in the morning until now (5:00
P.M
.), the dreadful slaughter raged. At the end of it, twelve thousand of our men are lying dead and wounded. Nothing since the battle of Pittsburgh Landing can compare with this day's fight, either in its colossal proportions or its bloody character.

This is, sadly, the bloodiest day of the war. Two hundred thousand men have taken to the field, and a battle greater than Waterloo raged from 5:00
A.M
. to dusk, yet night closes on an uncertain field.

I don't know, Mother, if you can imagine anything like twenty-five thousand dead and dying men, divided equally between North and South. As I write this, my ears are still filled with agonizing cries from thousands left on the field. And my eyes, Mother, saw an appalling, ghastly spectacle upon the slopes of the cornfield as far as the woodlands a mile away. Over twelve thousand bodies were on the ground and enough were alive and moving to give to the field a singular crawling effect from which emerged a single whitewashed church of the Dunker sect, set in the middle of it all. At midday, ten divisions—five Union, five Confederate—were so cut up that we backed off by mutual consent and did no more fighting that day. The Confederates had gone down as the wheat falls before the scythe. At that moment, I believed, for I saw it with my own eyes, that not one body of Confederate infantry could have resisted a serious advance. Lee's army was ruined and the end of the Confederacy was in sight.

No one understands why McClellan didn't send in reinforcements to Burnside, who had driven the Rebels back to Sharpsburg and cut the road to the ford over the Potomac. He let them escape—to say more is to speak treason.

I am safe and well, but our losses have been fearful. Poor Abbott is dead, Mumfried has a slight wound in the leg, Bond is shot in the jaw, Walcott in the shoulders. General Rodman was shot through the chest, the ball passing through his lung. General Monsfield was instantly killed. General Hartsuff of Rickett's Division was wounded in the right ileal region—a serious wound. Colonel Richard Oakford of Scranton, Pennsylvania
(132nd Penn. Volunteers), was killed. Lieutenant Sawyer, 7th Maine, killed, and about one hundred privates of the same regiment wounded. We now find that only six officers of the 20th are alive (not including Surgeon Hayward and myself) out of twenty. I have been promoted on the field. Your dutiful son is now a captain, detailed to run the division hospital with Dr. Diveneel.

Only God knows what we were forced to contemplate this day, and may He have mercy on us, Union and Confederate alike. For there is no more ground to soak up the blood, and so men lie in a burgundy lake of it, commingling northern blood with southern . . .

Oh God, Mother, how I miss you and love you and want to get home to you when this cruel war is over.

Your loving son,
Beverly Wellington

CAMP RAPIDAN
SEPTEMBER
1862

My Wife and Love,

The epidemics in the camp are growing—Asiatic cholera, smallpox, yellow fever—without taking into account typhus, which has caused 265 deaths in Camp Rapidan. Reports from Virginia list 427 smallpox cases, but 433 have died of scarlet fever and 558 of dysentery and 1,204 of tuberculosis. Some of the recruits should never hav e been accepted, as they were already sick. And the system of substitution whereby a rich man may pay a poor one to take his place in the draft and ultimately on the battlefield is an onerous one, as well as an impractical one, for these substitutes are often in poor and degraded health and die within a few months of entering camp life. No one, of course, knew what it would mean when a million men would be thrown together in regiments and divisions in camps, forced marches, military fortifications, hospitals, and on the road. Sanitary conditions and overcrowding have already taken more lives than bullets, sabers, or shells.