If something is not done, we shall be the murderers of our children.
Thomas Jefferson
It was the coldest winter in memory. The whole city groaned under a yoke of cruel Arctic frost that swept down from Canada, freezing the lakes, rivers, and even the harbor in ice so thick that even hundreds of skaters and Dutch sleighs propelled by blown sails couldn’t crack the surface. The new suspension bridge which spanned the Schuylkill River was covered with gargoyles of icicles and ghostly veils of frost, under which it groaned, shuddered, and glistened like Carborundum in the bluish northern light above the thirty-sixth parallel, the line which divided the United States into North and South, slave and free. The Rachel was prisoner in Philadelphia harbor, a chilled, immobile hulk, covered with crystal, her gold letters dripping with icy needles, her rails, planks, and ropes sculpted in congealed salt scum.
I sat facing the black panes of glass that separated me from the darkening world beyond, filled, it seemed, with scurrying, moving forces, like tiny pieces of metal sucked up onto the Uof a magnet. Blindly they crossed onto its arms, breaking and re-forming like a marching army. The windows, on which I hadn’t pulled the drapes, were frosted in delicate swirling designs, and the kerosene lamps sent a lighthouse beacon which filtered onto the court-yard. The beam bounced skyward, piercing the wall of evil coldness like a lance. The conservatory, which had been built onto the back of the house, was warm and cozy, heated by a Swedish coal-fired stove of painted blue-and-white porcelain. The delicate tiles gave off a radiance that duped the ferns and rubber plants and palms into believing they lived not in ten-degree-below-zero weather, but that they had regained the Equator and were somewhere loose on the thirtieth parallel in the wild, solitary landscape where we had left Thance and Abraham thirteen years ago.
I spread out my sheets of music, a transcription by Franz Liszt of Bellini’s Italian opera Norma, and my blank fingertips came down on the smooth ivory keys of the Pleyel pianoforte, my most cherished possession. The notes exploded through the room as the bars of music echoed and elevated Norma’s conflict between her duties as a high priestess and her emotions as a woman in the opera’s closing scales. My fingers flew over the keys, the discriminate, painful strains of Pui lento in B sharp leapt out, precise and unbending, swallowing the plaintive top of the oscillating melodic grains which threaded in and out of the sober base of Padre tu piagi, “Father, you are crying,” then resurfaced in the plaintive cry of Guerra, guerra. I spoke and sang to the piano, cajoling it, tempting and seducing it, trailing Liszt’s magnificent virtuoso notations, humming the notes or singing them, speaking under my breath, following the black soldiers that marched across the score page in formation, discriminate, uncompromising, inalienable. I closed my eyes for a moment, my hand moving now lightly and softly over the reprise of the fantasy’s climax, Padre tu piagi.“Father, you’re crying,” I sang under my breath as the last notes of the closing sequence drew to an end, the tendons and muscles of my neck and shoulders loosening, shifting, and flowing. The roots of my hair curled; my eyes gleamed behind my gold-rimmed spectacles. It was too hot in the room; the sheen on my nose and forehead became liquid. My hands on the keyboard were no longer those of a young girl, but were freckled with age marks and blue-veined, the skin rough despite all my creams and ointments. But the strength was still there, the fingers still long and straight. On my left hand, my two wedding bands gleamed in the warm gassy illumination.
Beauty’s daughter, Independence IV, stirred by my feet as I leaned away from the piano, then let the final presto con furia chords come crashing down. I let my hands rest on the surface of the ebbing music, trying to gather in the last strands of happiness the music offered me. It was a brilliant virtuoso piece of fifteen minutes, which I would never dare play in front of any public except my family, but whose B-flat Pui lénto was the most sublime piano passage I knew of. Guerra. War.
Beyond the panes of glass, forces were gathering that would make even the word war a newly minted one. Even the heavens were holding their breath and rationing the clouds of white, lazy flakes that would soon swish out of the sky and cover everything. I suppose it was because I had been fighting the private war of my own double identity for so long that I smelled war long before it came.
Behind me, as on a stage, the semicircle of my white family made a crescent of blurry, familiar shadows against the light. Christmas had passed and New Year’s Day was approaching, but the tree still stood weighted down with garlands of trinkets and pretty decorations kept from one year to the next. Like life, I thought, a chain of insignificant, glittering decorations strung together and draped in a way one could describe as “beautiful.” Suddenly I spun myself around on my stool, alarming the dog and eliciting a big smile from Maria.
“Mama, that was fantastic. To think we have Norma in our living room, thanks to Mr. Liszt.”
“He dedicated it to Marie Pleyel.”
I smiled at my middle daughter, Jane Elizabeth, who was as beautiful as the aunt after whom she was named. She was a good musician and a loving if conventional daughter. With her hair piled up and in black velvet, she looked older than her twenty-three years. Quiet, intense, obedient, she had a nascent charm; her dark good looks gave her an aura of drama that was far from her natural disposition. She had learned to enhance this effect with burgundy, black, dark purple, and somber forest green dresses. In a few months she would be married to an army lieutenant surgeon on tour in Wyoming. My son Beverly was twenty-five. Old enough, I repeated like a litany, to run. Beverly, too, reminded me of the brother he was named after: goodness itself, with a kind of diamond-hard ambition and will that belied his graceful, almost southern demeanor. He was a strawberry blond, with gray eyes and freckled skin. The only really fair person in the family except for me. Beverly looked a lot like me, but most of all, he looked a lot like his grandfather. His voice had remained high and girlish, and he had a laugh just like his. Ever since he was a child he had spent his time fixing things, growing things, taking things apart, and putting them together again. At eight he invented a miniature distillery; by ten he had already collected and named most of the flora and fauna at his grandmother’s country house. He would be a good doctor. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as an M.D. in 1855. One day he brought home from college a classmate, John Hill Callender. Fate would have it that he was the grandson of my parents’ nemesis, James T. Callender. I gazed at the two young men, innocent of everything.
We never forgive those whom we have wronged. . . .
As John Hill bent low over my hand, I wondered which of the three of them was twirling fastest in his grave . . . John Hill Callender was even engaged to marry a great-grandniece of Thomas Jefferson ... my grandniece.
I wouldn’t think about that now; I would think about it when I was calmer.
The twenty-year-old twins sat near their sister. Madison and James were ready to enter college. William John Madison and William John James were equally tall, lanky, loose-jointed, and athletic. They were self-possessed beyond their years, and their bright cheerfulness seemed to be a hallmark of placid, rational, contained characters. In fact, they looked a great deal like their father and his twin, Thor. They had the same swarthy smoothness and black eyes with flecks of gold. They had grown several inches in the past year and had not yet learned what to do with their bodies, which made them seem suspended somewhere between the quiet competence of young men and the rollicking antics of childhood.
Sinclair, my eldest, no longer lived at home. He had married three years ago and lived several blocks away, but he often stopped by in the evenings. He was the first medical doctor in the family, and Thor was uncommonly proud of him. It was Thor, after all, who had nurtured him into brilliance and diligence, a rare combination of intellectual rigor and poetic intuition. As a matter of fact, everyone agreed Sinclair was the family poet and intellectual, as well as a scientist. Grave and somber almost to a fault, he was more like my brother Thomas Woodston than any of his nearer relations or his own brothers and sisters, who deemed him boring. But he had a quiet seductiveness and a wicked humor all his own, which, under his disguise of conventionality, was as incisive as his surgeon’s scalpel.
Maria, sat on the floor next to Thor. At twelve she was still full of promise and baby fat. Her round, undefined face held the promise of great beauty, and her mind had, even now, a radical, phantasmagoric, burlesque quality that spoke of unquestioned brilliance if not real genius. She was being watched carefully by Thor, who saw in her an exceptional mind combined with the gift of synthesis and poetic conjuncture which was the mark of a true scientist and intellectual.
I had been lucky with my children. Maria and Madison seemed especially marked for exceptional achievement. My eldest daughter, Ellen, had married also and now lived with her husband and two children near Terrytown in Bucks County. I was a grandmother as well.
My skirts made circles on the carpet as my knees swung the piano stool back and forth. I took off my spectacles and drew my handkerchief out of my sleeve. I cleaned my glasses, and as I swung, the weight of James’s dagger pressed on my knee. I smiled. Would I never feel free enough to lay down my sword? Would I never make peace with ... I looked over the several feet at my adored and adoring family. My white people. I adjusted my spectacles.
“Would you like to play, Maria?” I asked.
“No, Mother. I think your concert is not to be surpassed.”
“You don’t have to surpass me, Maria.”
“It would only be boring.”
“It would not,” said Thor. “I hear your teachers are more than happy with your performances. They think a career as a musician is not out of the question.”
“It wouldn’t be, Papa, if women were allowed to play in symphony orchestras. But they’re not.”
“But this is not true in Europe,” I said. “Only the United States is so backward about such things.”
“Nevertheless, I’ll never regret my training,” Maria continued, “even if I never use it for more than giving music lessons to snooty children.”
“James, will you stop that horrible habit of smoking your father’s cigars? It’s unhealthy!”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And come give me a kiss.”
“Yes, Mother,” he repeated reluctantly.
As I held my twin son tightly, my brightest, my favorite, and inhaled the young male sweetness, my eyes were drawn in complicity to Thor, my love, my husband, my anchor, the father of my fatherless children, the one thing that kept me sane in the world in which I lived.
Thor looked up and smiled. He was still a handsome man. The slight thickening of his jaw and the new mustache streaked with gray surrounded the same chiseled features, the same black eyes under their thick eyebrows in the f-shapes of a violin, the same wide high cheekbones, the same high complexion, now permanently bronzed by the sun. I had never returned to Cape Town after that one trip to see Thance’s grave. But Thor had continued to conduct his expeditions, refusing to bow to my pleas, but he had curtailed the length of his trips in deference to his responsibility for his brother’s children. Sometimes Sinclair went with him. And every time they went, they visited Ladysmith. Sinclair would always write to me from that grassy knoll and send me dozens of delicate watercolors of the landscape.
Thor now had years of research behind him. The material he had gathered was sufficient for hundreds of studies without ever making another trip to the Cape. There were thousands of specimens in the laboratory, and scores of experiments going on. He had even published posthumously in London all of Thance’s papers and research on fingerprints. The thin volume was on the shelves of the library next to Francis Galton’s definitive monograph published the same year. He often kissed my blank fingertips without mentioning the accident. I wondered if it had crossed his mind these past fourteen years. Everyone else who would remember, except Thenia, was dead.
There was now a railroad car that passed through the warehouse, taking the Wellington Drug Company’s merchandise by steam engine west to Illinois and southwest as far as Arkansas. Arkansas had been added as a slave state in 1836, while Iowa had been added as a free state in 1846. Fifteen free states and fifteen slave states made up the Union. A bitter battle had raged on over the admission of Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, which had resulted in the Missouri Compromise. Now the admission of Kansas would tilt the delicate balance between slave and free states. That’s what we talked about, like everyone else in America, a country of twenty-three million people, four million of whom were slaves. In South Carolina and Mississippi, slaves outnumbered whites, and in Louisiana they equaled them. In Alabama they were roughly three-sevenths of the population. Just north of Charleston, they were eighty-eight percent, and on the Georgia seacoast, eighty. In central Alabama they were seventy percent, and along the Mississippi belt they outnumbered whites nine to one. Out of a southern white population of six million, only five percent owned slaves and three or four thousand families owned most of them, lived on the best lands, enjoyed three-fourths of the income, and wielded the political and intellectual power that was concentrated in that aristocratic group to which my father had belonged.
The old issue of slavery in the territories had been torn open again by Kansas and Nebraska. By the terms of the Missouri Compromise, all this rich, fertile, empty land beyond the Missouri River was closed to slavery above the thirty-sixth parallel. The frontiers of Kansas and Nebraska touched Missouri, which would probably become a free state as well. A new bill had been introduced in Congress that enraged Free Soil men and superseded the Missouri Compromise. It left Kansas and Nebraska open to settlers bringing slaves with them, and would allow the inhabitants to decide whether they would enter the Union slave or free. The Utah and New Mexico territories were free to decide on slavery, despite New Mexico being below the thirty-sixth parallel. To open these westerly, virgin prairies to slavery struck millions of us in the North as unforgivable.
And then, a strange and obscure Supreme Court case exploded into the national conscience: Scott v. Sandford. The court’s scandalous decision on the side of slaveholding had drawn a tighter and tighter knot around bondsmen and bestowed on slave masters new powers to recapture, pursue, and control their troublesome “property.” It had curtailed the liberties not only of free blacks in both the North and the South, but of white citizens in the North who wanted nothing to do with owning slaves.
Dred Scott had spent most of his sixty-odd years as the slave of an army surgeon, John Emerson, who had taken him into the free territory of Illinois and to Fort Snelling, above the thirty-sixth parallel. At Fort Snelling he married a female slave of Emerson’s, and had a child born free by the provisions of the Missouri Compromise. When his owner died and his widow inherited them, friends of Scott advised him to sue for freedom on the grounds of prolonged residence in a free state. Eleven years later, his simple suit for freedom had become a rallying cry of slavery and was appealed before the Supreme Court.
In 1857 the court ruled that Dred Scott was separated from the Constitution and all the rights it bestowed, and that he was not a citizen. Negroes were not included in the “all men” of my father’s Declaration, men whom God had created “equal.” For that matter, claimed the court, at the time of the Constitution, Negroes were regarded as beings of an inferior order—so far inferior that they had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. The court ruled that Dred Scott’s sojourn in free territory did not make him free, because a ban on slavery was unconstitutional. The justices had decided that the Constitution protected slavery and the property of slaveowners in all the states and territories. It was hereafter a slaveowner’s Constitution, not a free man’s. And the North cried never, never, never.
The name of Dred Scott was on all our lips that night.
“I cannot prove that the Dred Scott decision is part of a conspiracy to expand slavery, but when I see a lot of framed timbers, which I know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger Taney, and President Buchanan, for in-stance—and when I see these timbers joined together and see they exactly make the frame of a house, I, like Abraham Lincoln, find it impossible not to believe that those inspired carpenters all worked upon a common plan, trying to push slavery forward till it shall become lawful in all the states, north as well as south.”
Thor was glancing through the newspapers Sinclair had brought him.
“Slave power,” said Sinclair, “controls the President and fills all the offices. Not only do they count three-fourths of their slaves as electorate in order to augment their representation in the Senate and the House, which allows them to control the electoral college, I do believe they intend to extend slavery by Supreme Court decree into all the states in the Union. They’re going to do it by chipping away at the Missouri Compromise and all other laws that protect the free territories.”
“No court would dare such a folly!” I cried.
“No court? What about the past steps leading to the hangman’s court of Dred Scott? The silencing of the presidency, the loading of the Supreme Court with southerners, the Fugitive Slave Act, and finally the Kansas-Nebraska Act? And what will follow?” I looked up expectantly for his response. “I’ll tell you, Mother,” continued Sinclair. “The South wants the addition of Cuba and Haiti as slave territories, and the revival of the slave trade on the world market. The Dred Scott decision is an alarming prediction of things to come. If a slave is movable property in the territories, why not in the free states as well?”
“That would mean that a slave master could bring his ‘movable’ property into any state in the North against our will,” I said.
“The Scott decision, my dear, has already put slavery in all the territories. I’m afraid the next step is to establish it in all the northern states,” retorted Thor. “In the name of social concord, we are asked to swallow the idea that whoever wants slavery has the right to have it—that the Negro has no share, humble or not, in the Declaration of Independence,” continued Thor. “This notion is blowing out the moral lights around us and preparing us for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.”
“It is never treated as a wrong,” I added petulantly. “What other thing that you consider as a wrong do you deal with like that? Perhaps you say it is wrong, but President Buchanan never does. You quarrel with anybody who says it is wrong. One must say nothing about slavery here, because it is not here. You must say nothing about it there because it isthere. I personally cannot live that way.”
“What, then,” said Thor in anguish, “becomes of the Union?”
“The Union splits,” I said.
“Let the division come with violence if necessary, rather than submit to slave power,” Thor added with such vibrato that his voice hung suspended in the air.
“Who made you a Black Republican?” I asked, laughing.
“You,” he said tenderly.
That’s why I always count the beginning of the war with Dred Scott. It was Dred Scott who forced white people to admit they considered all Negroes, free or unfree, a fugitive population. A population without a country and without rights. The very definition of black in America was “fugitive.” All blacks in America were fugitive. They themselves made up a fugitive population, ready for oblivion, for invisibility, always running away, crossing borders, frontiers, color bars: a race who couldn’t fix themselves anywhere that wasn’t a place where they were apt to be gotten rid of, hunted, maltreated, hidden; to be ignored, refused, and unrecognized. And perhaps because I lived in enemy territory, I saw it clearer than darker Negroes—than Thenia or Raphael—or white Americans like Thor or my children.
The dichotomy of my life made clear to me what my white family couldn’t see—we were a nation of fugitives: Irish, Germans, Italians, and Swedes. All in flight from one thing or another, all in quest of my father’s idea. Yet only fugitive blacks were considered aliens in their own country. These fugitive Europeans became true-blue Americans in one generation, yet two hundred years of residence had not produced one true-blue American black, as far as they were concerned.
But then the event that truly galvanized the country occurred: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. John Brown was a white radical and Free Soiler, a dedicated abolitionist who heard “voices” and followed them. He had already waged a notorious guerrilla war in Kansas in the cause of Free Soil. And his plan had been to seize government property and incite the slaves in the area to insurrection and the establishment of a stronghold in the southern mountains of Kansas.
On the night of October 14, 1859, with his sons and a small group of followers, he went ahead with his plan and occupied the town. The insurgent army of slaves never appeared simply because he had given them no previous notice—no plan of battle, no provisions, no escape routes. Brown was attacked and defeated by a colonel named Robert E. Lee, who killed ten of the band including three of Brown’s sons, but John Brown was taken alive and hanged on December 2, 1859. When I reached my bed, entered, and pulled the covers up over my head, I turned my back to Thor, who slept the sleep of the just. In moments his hand slipped around my waist and pulled me into his embrace. He sighed contentedly, his head nestled in the nape of my neck and my long braid. His gesture was tender, possessive, trusting, and innocent. All the things I felt none of, that night.
Civil war was almost upon us. One could feel it in the tense, suffocating atmosphere of the country. One could hear it in the hysterical shouts and cries of the crowds at political rallies. The war was like a tidal wave held back by a wall of crystal; so much as a whisper would shatter everything. Something bigger, greater, more momentous would take its place.
Lincoln’s election convinced the South that it would have to remove the authority of the federal government from its soil by force. Less than three months after the inauguration, the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and established itself in Montgomery, Alabama. First South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, then Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded from the Union.
Through the long, weary months while Lincoln vacillated over the border states, the northern pro-slavery press and the merchant and industrial class tried to buy peace for the North by granting concession after concession to the South. The South confined its war efforts to threats and declarations, wearing cockades, and displaying palmettos and rattlesnake flags and their thousands of cannon. Until one day, President Lincoln decided to resupply Major Anderson and his beleaguered garrison at Fort Sumter and the rebel states used their firepower against the flag. That day everything and everyone changed.
Madison and James had come bursting into the Freedman’s Protection Committee’s office like cannons themselves with the news. “The Rebs have fired on Fort Sumter! Lincoln’s declared war! It’s in all the papers!” It was April 12, 1861.
Thank God, I thought. The slaveholders themselves had finally saved the cause of abolition from ruin. Our greatest danger had been the monstrous concessions Lincoln had accorded the slave states and the border states in exchange for peace. He had practically begged them upon bended knee to return. He promised not to touch slavery in the Confederate states; to leave it be as it was. He promised the border states to keep the Union as it was, that he would protect the institution of slavery as set forth by the Constitution.
“I have no tears to shed over the fall of Fort Sumter,” I said. “They have spiked their own guns. They have shot off the legs of the compromisers and compelled everybody to choose between patriotic loyalty and pro-slavery treason. God be praised,” I told Emily Gluck that day outside the Freedman’s Committee offices. “Lincoln cannot sacrifice the slaves to the Union and thus save it, because there is no longer any hope of saving the Union.”
I turned to Emily. “The South wasn’t forced to do this,” I continued. “The government stood waiting, praying to be gracious. Kind. It treated the South’s treason as some sort of eccentricity that a few months’ patience would probably cure. But all that’s changed now.” Thank God.
“Oh, Harriet, our national sin has found us out! No foreign power is about to chastise us, no king, offended by our prosperity, has plotted our destruction: slavery has done it all. Our enemies are of our own household. It is civil war, the worst of all wars.”
“Emily is right,” said Thor that night. “The South has lifted its hand against the government of the United States itself and defied its power. For twenty years we did everything we could to conciliate, gain the favor, and secure the loyalty of the slaveholding class. We’ve persecuted the Negro, swallowed the Dred Scott decision, hanged John Brown. We’ve enacted harder Black Codes, let slave hunters hunt humans like beasts all over the North, repealed the laws designed to prevent the spread of slavery, and in a thousand ways given over our strength, our moral and political influence, to increase the power and ascendancy of slave power. And now, this is our reward—the Confederacy comes with sword, musket, and cannon to overthrow the government. The power we used to crush the Negro has overtaken the white man. The republic has put one end of the chain on the ankle of the slave and the other end around its own neck.”
“How long you think it’ll take us to whip the Rebs?” said Madison eagerly. But Thor went on as if he were speaking to himself.
“The American people and the government may refuse to recognize it for a time, but the inexorable logic of events will force upon them in the end the fact that the war that has now befallen us is a war for or against slavery, and that it can never be put down until one or the other of these forces is completely destroyed.”
“Well, Ma,” said James, “you got your wish. We’re freeing the slaves.”
“We’ve bound up the fate of the republic and that of the slave in the same bundle, and the one and the other must survive or perish together. To separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government, to attempt a peace for the whites while leaving the blacks in chains, will be labor lost.”
“Goddamn the Confederacy!” interjected Madison.
But the tone of Thor’s voice frightened me. It was the voice of a doctor who had just diagnosed a death by cancer. It was firm, slow, full of compassion, but inexorable, precise, weary, even cruel. This was the longest speech he had ever made about slavery. It was the only one he had ever made in the presence of my sons. The twins were twenty-five years old. Old enough to run. Old enough to fight. Old enough to die.
Outside, people were dancing in the streets. The long agony of waiting and indecision was finally over. Homes, stores, and streetcars were bedecked with banners in the wake of Fort Sumter, and Philadelphia would soon turn into a war city. The President’s call for troops set men drilling everywhere. Philadelphia’s quota was six regiments. There was no way I could keep Madison, James, Beverly, and Sinclair from volunteering. Sinclair joined the navy and Madison, James, and Beverly joined the Twenty-fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment, which was soon incorporated into the Army of the Potomac. Raphael Boss was not allowed to enlist in the army, but the navy readily accepted him on the schooner S. J. Waring. Soon, regiments in dark blue and light gray were drilling in the streets of Philadelphia. Recruiting centers, hospitals, and the Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon of Philadelphia were doing a booming business. The war would be short. Ninety days. The war would be sweet. The South would return to the Union as it was after having been taught a good lesson in Yankee soldiering.
“Let me tell you something, Mrs. Wellington,” Thenia said. “We are going to beat our slaveholding Virginia cousins. Raphael and Sinclair and the twins and Beverly are going to whip those lily-white asses till they cry ‘Uncle.’ “
And then she threw back her head and laughed till she cried. She laughed and her laughter was so much like the breezy colored lady in Market Street Square that two pink cabbage roses grew right out of Thenia’s topknot.
The booming wartime city of Philadelphia was soon ungovernable, with its welter of tiny jurisdictions that impeded police work and encouraged the reign of hoodlums like the Moyamensing Killers. Fifty-one other known street gangs of adolescents and young men battled each other for territorial rights on streetcorners, terrorized passersby, and covered walls and fences with scrawled slogans. Pitched battles routinely broke out between the fire department and the gangs. Anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-German, anti-southern riots broke out throughout the city. Several lynchings and near lynchings were reported in Moyamensing; one was that of a Negro married to a white woman. The mayor reorganized the police department to give him maximum control over the city, and he began to enforce the Sunday “blue laws” against liquor sales, newspapers, and amusement parks in accordance with the Quaker principle of the sanctity of the Christian Sabbath. The growth of population as the city girded itself for war was so great that the real-estate market was not old enough to have acquired a reservoir of deteriorating older houses into which the poor might move as the better-off departed. The rich still occupied the center of the city between Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine streets, and the poor had to build houses for themselves in the slums of Kingsensing or Richmond just next to them. Bad streets and the absence of transport obliged workers to live as close as they could to the mills and factories that began to turn out Union uniforms. Domestics and menial workers gathered in the alleys and side streets behind the town houses of their employers. Philadelphia became a teeming anthill of small, low, single-family houses as the city’s gridiron expanded into the suburbs and even the countryside to infinity.
At first Philadelphias could scarcely believe that the slavery controversy had embroiled the country in civil war. Everything southern was still exalted and worshiped. Philadelphias had never imagined the North agitating the slavery question to the extremity of war, because they themselves did not like Negroes. Nothing really changed this attitude, even when armed and uniformed colored troops paraded in the streets.
The war brought Thenia and me closer than we had been since Abraham’s death. She had continued running the apothecary and working as a midwife. Her only dream was that somehow she would get to Richmond during the war and be able to search for her family. Already runaway slaves were streaming into Union barracks and forts; most of them were promptly returned to their masters under direct orders from President Lincoln. Only General Frémont in Missouri and General Butler in Maryland had attempted any solution to the problem of fugitives crossing military lines. Frémont simply emancipated them and then conscripted them into the army as laborers, and Butler confiscated them as contraband and set them to work as well.
“If they’re property,” said Thenia, “then if they fall into the hands of the enemy, they are the booty of war.”
“Except,” I said, “that this is the only booty that can walk into the hands of the enemy.”
The President was furious that his generals had taken the issue into their own hands. He, Lincoln, had no intentions of interfering with slavery in the South. He ordered Frémont to revoke his emancipation decree and Butler to return all the contraband he had confiscated. But the name contraband stuck.
“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.