December 1859
‘Only a damned fool would marry a Quaker!’ Jed Strong said angrily. ‘Blast it, Bo, you can’t do it!’
‘I can,’ his brother said. ‘And I’m going to. We’ve had all this out before, Jed. I’ve talked to you, to Pa, to Ruth’s parents. With the whole damned world, it seems to me. Everyone says the same thing. Don’t do it. Well, to hell with the whole damned world. Ruth and I are in love and we want to get married, and that’s an end of it!’
‘That’s a beginning of it, maybe,’ Jed said. ‘But a long, long way from an end. Listen, Bo. You remember when you left the Point? They offered you a commission in the artillery and I told you to turn it down.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So you took it anyway and they posted you to the back of beyond.’
‘Fort Walla Walla is not the back of beyond.’
‘Don’t split hairs. If the Pacific Northwest isn’t the back of beyond, it’ll do till they discover what is.’
‘Maybe Texas,’ Andrew said unrepentantly. ‘Where you’re going.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ Jed said. He sat forward in his seat, a stocky, strongly-built young man of medium height, with dark hair and dark eyes that flashed now with angry impatience. He was ‘a typical Strong’, everyone said. Andrew was not: taller than Jed, his hair and moustache a sandy, light brown color, he had the hazel eyes of his mother’s family, the Ten Eycks.
‘So you went to the Northwest,’ Jed went on. ‘Did I try to stop you?’
‘Not unless you’d call nagging me non-stop for a month “trying to stop me”,’ Andrew said. He was used to his brother’s vehemence. That was Jed’s way. He tackled things head-on. Once he had made up his mind, Jed gave his problems no further consideration. I wish I could be more like him, Andrew thought, then amended the thought. I wish I could be more like him sometimes.
‘Well,’ Jed said, spreading his hands. ‘You hated it, didn’t you?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Some, all, what’s the difference? You resigned your commission. ‘
‘Yes, Jed,’ Andrew said patiently. ‘But not because I hated the place. I told you at the time.’
‘I know, I know, you hated what the army made you do there,’ Jed said with an impatient gesture. ‘A soldier’s supposed to do his duty, without question.’
‘Blind duty, Jed?’ Andrew shook his head. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘All right, all right,’ Jed said. ‘So you’ve got a conscience. You think you were the only one in the army that had?’
‘Jed, you’re missing the point. A man has to follow his own conscience, not other people’s.’
‘Well, you resigned your commission anyway,’ Jed went on. ‘But did I give you a bad time?’
‘You told me I was stupid. But you didn’t give me a bad time, no.’
‘You know I didn’t,’ Jed said. ‘I tried to understand. We all did. Me, Pa, everyone.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Andrew replied. He remembered his father’s reaction when he returned East after his service in the Northwest. He had thought that if anyone might understand his decision, his father was the one. David Strong had firmly rejected the military life right from the start, resigning his commission immediately after his graduation from West Point. He wanted to do only one thing in life: restore the celebrated Strong bloodstock line to its former pre-eminence in horse-breeding circles.
‘And what will you do instead?’ David had asked his son when Andrew told him what had happened. There was an expectant light in his eye, as if he was hoping to hear something that he had been waiting for for a long time.
‘I’ve joined a firm of civil engineers in Washington, Pa,’ Andrew told him. ‘Chalfont, Latimer & Chenies. It’s a good job.’ They always said that to graduate from West Point was a guarantee of an engineer’s job, even if you didn’t go into the army. Many of the young men who had graduated with Andrew in 1857 had since found themselves fine positions in the burgeoning engineering and building industry.
‘Then you decided to be a civil engineer,’ Jed was saying. ‘Didn’t talk it over with anyone, of course. Didn’t ask anybody whether they thought it was a good idea or not. Just went ahead and did it.’
‘I thought about it very carefully, Jed,’ Andrew said. ‘A long time.’
‘And the fact that Pa was hoping you’d help him run the stud made no “never-mind”, did it?’
‘I didn’t realize … until later,’ Andrew said. ‘It didn’t occur to me.’ But it should have, he thought, remembering that look on his father’s face. It should have.
‘Did anybody try to stop you?’ Jed said. ‘Did Pa? Did I?’
‘No.’
‘There then, you see!’ Jed said triumphantly. ‘That proves what I’ve been saying!’
‘Which was what, Jed?’
‘That the family’s never interfered with your decisions.’
‘I never said it had,’ Andrew pointed out. ‘Till now.’
‘Well, Hell, Bo!’ Jed said. ‘You don’t expect us not to make some sort of protest, do you? I mean, after all, you’re planning to marry a Quaker. A Quaker! It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘It does to me,’ said Andrew doggedly.
‘You plan to join them?’ Jed asked. ‘Turn Quaker?’
‘I don’t know. I might.’
‘You’ll have to or they’ll disown her.’
‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘They’re changing all that. Next year Quakers will be allowed to marry out.’
‘I always thought—’
‘What do you know about the Quakers, Jed?’ Andrew interrupted.
‘Not a Hell of a lot.’
‘Then you’re in no position to advise,’ Andrew retorted hotly.
‘Bo, you’re too much of an idealist,’ Jed said. ‘Maybe you’re right, Jed,’ Andrew said. ‘But I know I couldn’t have done what you did at Harper’s Ferry.’
‘We only did what had to be done.’
‘Hang a man for his beliefs?’
‘John Brown was hanged because he tried to start a slave rebellion, Bo!’ Jed said. ‘Because he damn nearly started a civil war!’
‘The way it looks to me, hanging John Brown has made that more likely, not less.’
‘That’s as may be,’ Jed said. It was his turn to be stubborn now. ‘But that’s not my problem. I’m a soldier. I had my orders and I carried them out.’
‘Blind duty, again.’
‘If you like,’ Jed said.
He had been with the hastily assembled military force rushed to the Virginia town of Harper’s Ferry when the news reached Washington that John Brown, the notorious Kansas abolitionist, had led a band of insurgents into town and occupied the Federal arsenal there. It was – depending entirely upon whether or not you were pro- or anti-slavery – a magnificent, bold stroke or a doomed gesture of bravado and folly. Either way, the ‘uprising’ had been put down sharply and shortly by a force commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee and spearheaded by a hundred United States Marines.
Jed had been part of that force and part of the one later moved to Charlestown to forestall any attempt at the last-minute deliverance of ‘Old Osawatomie’. There was none: John Brown had been tried and sentenced to death. They hanged him on the morning of December 2 1859. The furor which had surrounded these events had not died down when Jed received word at Charlestown that his grandfather and namesake, Jedediah Morrison Strong, had died on the same morning as Brown’s execution. He joined his brother in Washington so that they could travel down to Culpeper together to attend the funeral.
As he sat in the swaying carriage of the Alexandria, Orange and Richmond train, he regarded his younger brother with affectionate annoyance. Too damned set in his ways by a long chalk, he thought. A man had to be flexible; take the moment. Andrew had always been the cautious one. They used to go hunting together. When they reached a river, Jed would just throw himself in and start thrashing his way to the other side. Not Andrew. Andrew would walk along the bank, judging the best place to slide into the water, where the current was perhaps not so powerful. By which time Jed would be on the other side hooting with amusement at his brother’s slow progress. If it ever bothered Andrew, he never showed it. Old Slowcoach, Jed had called him affectionately.
‘Well, Jed,’ he heard his brother say. ‘I guess we’re going to have to agree to differ, like always. I need better reasons to kill other human beings than the fact that they’re wrongheaded or misguided. I suppose that’s why I find the Quakers so sympathetic. They will not lift their hands against their fellow man.’
‘The way things are going,’ Jed said darkly, ‘they may not have any choice in the matter.’
‘There’s always a choice, Jed,’ Andrew said.
‘No,’ Jed said. ‘In the final analysis, Bo, there isn’t. If it’s a choice between killing or being killed, there’s no choice at all. Every man has to take that stand.’
‘No,’ Andrew argued. ‘Surely not! It takes two to make a fight.’
‘You sound like Pa,’ Jed said.
‘You think he’s wrong? You think it’s wrong to see both sides of this argument, to say that the people who want to abolish slavery have some justice on their side, while the people who oppose the way they want to go about it have, too?’
‘Not wrong, Bo,’ Jed growled. He was not much of a one for philosophy. Things generally had a right and a wrong to them, and that was that. You made your mind up which was which and then you got on with it.
‘There’s a middle ground, Jed,’ Andrew insisted. ‘There has to be.’
‘That’s what I mean when I say you sound like Pa,’ Jed said. ‘He thinks he can stay neutral in all this. I don’t think anyone will be able to, Bo. I think there is going to be a war between the Northern states and the slave states, and everyone will have to make his stand. Sooner or later, everyone has to.’
‘I know,’ Andrew said. ‘And I’m taking mine, Jed. I’m against war, and I’m for anything and anybody who’ll work to prevent it.’
‘Like your Quakers.’
‘Like my Quakers,’ Andrew said.
‘You’re going to do it, then. Marry her?’
‘We’ve already spoken of our intent at the meeting,’ Andrew replied. ‘Of course I am going to marry Ruth. Dammit, Jed, I want to marry her! I love her!’
‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, Bo,’ Jed said. ‘I smell trouble ahead. A whole lot of trouble.’