The President's Daughter (57 page)

Earlier, the conservatory had shaken with the booming of cannons from the armory, and all of Philadelphia's church bells had retaliated in a frenzy of dissonance as I read aloud the words of the Proclamation of September twenty-third from the headlines of the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

“ ‘I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be, free.'

“ ‘And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States. . . .'

“ ‘And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution ... I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God . . .'

“ ‘Done this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand
eight hundred and sixty-three and of the Independence of the United States of America, the eighty-seventh.' “

I had paused after that, my eyes filling with tears, thinking of my father's Declaration, always that reference: my father. He was like a presence in the room, in the nation—as if the whole turmoil of the war revolved around him.

“People—
colored
people—were dancing in the streets this morning,” said Maria in her precise and lilting enunciation.

“They're calling it the day of Jubilee.”

“Lincoln must think we're losing this war.”

“Lincoln doesn't say anything about the slaveowners who stayed loyal to the Union. They get to keep their property, it seems. He's exempted all of Tennessee and West Virginia,” remarked Maurice.

“He doesn't say anything about colonization, either.”

“Well, he can't very well ask black folks to join the army,” said Raphael, “and leave the country at the same time.”

“And what about the four billion dollars they're worth? Is the United States going to compensate the slaveowners for their property?” said Maurice.

“Emancipation with compensation! Emancipation with reparation! Emancipation and deportation! That's all I hear!” I replied, my voice rising. “What about emancipation with reparation
for the slave
? Reparation for the crime of kidnapping, baby-snatching, unlawful imprisonment, cruel and unusual punishment? How about compensation for stealing a mother's child from her arms?”

Thor looked at me strangely. “I've often thought of that,” he said slowly, “but I never had the nerve to articulate it.”

“No, you were busy deporting the entire race.”

“No, that's not fair, Mother.”

“Why should I cry over the bankrupt South?”

“Why, ‘cause you're a Virginian, Ma. Even if you hate the South, they're still your people,” said James.

James was right. They were still my people, my Blue Ridge Mountains, my Beaver Creek, my sunrise and my sunset, my field of tobacco blossoms, I thought. But he's your grandfather, I mused. Listen to you all. You own him. You recite him. You memorize him. He belongs to you. You imbibed him with your mother's milk. . . .

“Let the South,” I said slowly, “spend every single penny of their treasure, which colored people have earned for them. Let them spill a drop of their own blood for every drop of colored people's blood they've spilled or contaminated.
I have no pity and contemplate no mercy for the so-called bleeding Confederacy.”

“Is that a prayer, Mother?” asked Maria.

“I think we should pray, Maria,” I said.

The Proclamation had made me a woman who was no longer viable. An Underground Railroad conductor who no longer had passengers. An abolitionist whose function had been abolished. I skimmed on the brink of extinction—outdistanced, surpassed, and annihilated by my own biography. People who passed for white in order to be free were redundant. I had been born Jefferson's bastard; I was now Lincoln's child.

A terrible loneliness pierced me, more terrible than any I had known before. My husband and sons would emancipate their own mother and wife.
Without ever knowing it.
It was the
ever knowing it
that snapped my head forward.

The prayer wouldn't come. Outside I could hear the faint sounds of Jubilee like a musical accompaniment. The crack of fireworks had begun, and also the distant rumble of thousands of bodies in motion. The ships in the harbor added their guns to the ones at the armory, and they alternated, keeping time like bass drums in an orchestra with the cymbals of fifty church bells. The sound lifted me off my knees and to my piano, where I sat, my head bowed.

“Play something, Mother,” said James.

But I didn't know what to play. I reached down and caressed Independence's great-great-great granddaughter, Liberty. I left marks on her as I left marks on the keys of the piano, because they were stained black with newsprint. I began softly, the first strains of Stephen Foster's new song: “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong.”

Events that spring succeeded one another with kaleidoscopic rapidity. Successive disasters for the Union army and triumphs for the Confederacy emboldened General Robert E. Lee to march his army north across the Mason-Dixon line into Pennsylvania to threaten Harrisburg.

In June, the Philadelphia division of the U.S. Sanitary Commission held its huge central fair testimonial in Logan Square for the benefit of the army and Abraham Lincoln. To our surprise, the President agreed to appear. All of Philadelphia turned out to hear him.

Lincoln's speech was directed against Philadelphia Peace Democrats.

“There are those who are dissatisfied with me,” he began. “To such I would say: You decry peace, and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First to suppress
the rebellion by force of arms. This, I am trying to do. Are you for it?”

At this point, there was much applause and cheering and stamping of feet.

“If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it?”

A storm of booing and stamping and whistling and cries of “No! No!” filled the tent.

“If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, then there remains only compromise. I do not believe any compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union is now possible. The strength of the rebellion is its army. No compromise can be used to keep Lee's army out of Pennsylvania! Only Hooker's army can keep Lee's army out of Pennsylvania; and I think can ultimately drive it out of existence. . . .”

More cheers and cries of “Hear! Hear!” and hurrahs filled the air. The President was a mesmerizing speaker, looming on stage like a black hawk, his dark hair standing straight up on his head, his gunmetal eyes intense and gleaming, the lines of his face and forehead seemingly traced in black crayon on a complexion darker than a Negro's.

“But, to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the Negro. You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation; you say it is unconstitutional—I think differently. The Constitution invests its commander-in-chief with martial law in time of war. Is there—has there ever been—any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? The Emancipation Proclamation and the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion. You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for
you
...” Over the cheers of the colored people in the auditorium, he continued, “... to save the Union. Whenever we have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to keep fighting, it will be apt time,
then,
for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes. . . .”

I stared at the figure onstage. Had I lived a white life so long that I no longer put myself in the category of the people he was talking about? What was I? If I was as white as I pretended, why did my blood boil at the word
Negro
in the President's mouth? He considered it little more than a category, as my father had, or my husband did. When, I wondered, would
Negro
equate with
American
in the President's mind? Which algebraic equation of sacrifice and suffering would he use? One-half? One-third? One-sixteenth? As if in answer to my question, the President continued.

“I think that whenever Negroes can be got to act like soldiers, it leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. . . .”

Anything the white man left him to do, couldn't do himself, was too dirty
or dangerous for him to do ... so that was to be the President's equation.

“Does it appear otherwise to you? But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.”

The auditorium was getting restless. A scuffle broke out in the back. Thor and Charlotte's husband left a group of men in uniform to join us.

“Lee is in Pennsylvania. Hooker is to turn his army around and march north to meet him, except that Hooker don't know where he is,” a voice roared from the back of the tent. But the President continued serenely, defending his actions.

“It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet. . . . And then there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation. While I fear there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have striven to hinder it.”

The applause, boos, whistles, cheers all began before the President was finished.

“Let's find Robert E. Lee first!”

“Fire General Hooker!”

Over the din of noise and movement, I heard Thor's voice raised in argument with Andrew Nevell.

“There can be no army without men,” he said. “Men can be had only voluntarily or involuntarily. We have ceased to obtain them voluntarily, and to obtain them involuntarily is the draft, Andrew, the conscription.”

“We can't find the numbers,” Andrew Nevell was saying.

“I know much complaint is made of the provision which allows a drafted man to substitute three hundred dollars for himself; yet none is made of that provision which allows him to substitute another man for himself!” interjected Gustav Gluck.

“The substitution of one man for another is the provision which really favors the rich over the poor, but this being an old and well-known practice in raising armies, nobody objects to it,” replied Andrew.

“Isn't that what we're doing by allowing colored men to volunteer? Substituting a black man for a white one? After all, the overriding principle of the draft is simply involuntary servitude,” said Gustav.

“Lincoln's right about that—let the darkies, or at least some of them, do it,” Nevell replied.

“What's the particular hardship now?” exclaimed Thor. “Shall we shrink from the necessary means to maintain our free government, which our grandfathers employed to establish, and our own fathers have maintained? Are we degenerate? Has the manhood of our race run out? Do we need Negroes to fight for us?”

“There is something too mean,” said Thor, “in us Americans looking upon the Negro as a citizen when we are in trouble and as an alien when we are free from trouble. When our country was in trouble in its early struggles, it looked upon the Negro as a citizen. In 1776 he was a citizen. At the time of Jefferson's Constitution, the Negro had the right to vote in eleven states out of the old thirteen. In 1812, General Jackson addressed them as fellow citizens. He wanted them to fight! And now, when conscription time has come upon us, the Negro is a citizen again. Join the army! Dig ditches, trenches, earthworks! He has been a citizen just three times in the history of our country, and every time it has always been in order to get killed.”

Emily, Charlotte, and I left the tent and our menfolk behind, arguing. They were, as always, defending their manhood and their country with
our
sons. I smiled ironically. As a mother, I would gladly have paid three hundred dollars as a substitution for any of my sons. By slave-auction standards, that price was a true bargain.

Robert E. Lee could bring this war to a triumphant end for the South over the divided, confused Union if he succeeded in winning one more victory on northern soil. I knew southern pride and southern character well enough to know the general was gambling everything on the next battle. And the next battle would be here, in Pennsylvania.

• Gettysburg • • In the Chapel •

• The Rebel Deserter •

• James Hemings's Affidavit

• A Broken Mirror •

• Chance •

• The Aria •

• This One Will Live•

My only comfort and confidence is that I shall not live to see this!

Thomas Jefferson

Robert E. Lee invaded the North, marching into Pennsylvania. From that day on, my twins' lives became one swift succession of forced marches, becoming ever longer and harder as they rushed to find the Army of Northern Virginia. Night and day blended together over the miles: through dust and through muck they marched, in the broiling sun, in flooding rain, over prairies, through defiles, across rivers, over last year's battlefields where skeletons of dead soldiers still lay exposed and bleaching; weary, without sleep, tormented by newspaper rumor that their enemy was in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, every place where he was not, until they found out where he was: at Gettysburg, a small village not thirty miles from their grandmother's country house in Anamacora.