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Nothing Asia or John can say stops the slaughter. Asia pleads, she shouts. She sobs in her fury and her disappointment. There, literally up in smoke, goes her chance to be someone more than what she is. “Leave us something,” she begs and so Mother begins to tear off the signatures—Tom Flynn, Robert Elliston, the famous blackface performer Daddy Rice—and hand these to Asia prior to burning the letters to which they were attached. The only thing these signatures offer is the certainty that a fascinating wealth of information is now ash. “I will never forgive you,” Asia tells Mother and she means it as only Asia can. She has an unforgiving heart, Shylock’s heart, John once told her, and she wishes it weren’t true, but knows that it is. She may let go, she may move past, but she never will forgive.
For several days, the only person she talks to is John. If Mother enters a room, Asia immediately quits it. John is less devastated—he has other dreams to sustain him—but equally angry. “It was a kind of murder,” John says, which is exactly what Asia also thinks. “A homicidal mania.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mother says eventually. “I can tell you anything you need to know for your little book,” but Asia has already made a different plan. She writes to those friends of Father’s she knows well, asking them to send her what they remember, along with any playbills and reviews they might have kept. It occurs to her that Father’s sister may have had her own letters and memorabilia. Aunt Jane has recently died, but Uncle Mitchell is still in Baltimore, cast off by his children and living a grasping existence in a squalid garret. Asia decides she would rather talk to her drunken, miserly, contemptible uncle than to her mother.
It is now 1854. June is prospering in San Francisco. He and Hattie have had a baby girl. Her name is Marion Rosalie Edwina Booth.
Edwin is booked for a fall tour to Australia and Hawaii arranged by the British actress and manager Laura Keene. His letters are full of excitement and plans. “I will make a fortune,” he promises, “and then I will lose it all before I return.”
Lincoln and the Kansas-Nebraska Act
We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell into utter confusion.
—Abraham Lincoln’s first response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854
Prior to the admission of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union, the federal policy was to keep the slave and free states in some sort of rough balance. For over thirty years, slavery had been forbidden north of the 36°30′ latitude. The Kansas-Nebraska Act voided this prohibition, upending the Missouri Compromise and threatening those arrangements that had been holding the Union together, if barely.
Stephen Douglas now proposed that decisions about slavery should be made locally, state by state, vote by vote. Congress debated the matter for months, often with spectacular threats, epithets, accusations. The Act was eventually passed by the Senate in March, the House in May. President Pierce signed it into law on May 30th.
The entire political landscape transformed. A feeling in the North that the South had long wielded too much power over the national politics, that they were expanding slavery into the new territories and perhaps had their eyes on the North itself, resulted in the end of the Whig Party and the creation of the Republican.
The abolitionists doubled their efforts. Kansas became a place of blood and terror. Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, beat Charles Sumner from Massachusetts nearly to death on the floor of the Senate with his cane. Sumner’s recovery from this beating took three years while Brooks became a hero throughout the South, receiving canes as gifts wherever he went. Rather than saving the Union, the Kansas-Nebraska Act hastened the war.
Douglas returned to Illinois to defend himself. He told his friends he could have traveled all night by the light of his own burning effigies. As he began to cross the state, speaking in support of his Act, Lincoln began to follow and answer him.
. . . we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together.
They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.
—Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854
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vii
John becomes a farmer. Asia can see that he feels the same despair over this that Edwin once felt facing a future as a carpenter. He leaves the house before Asia rises in the morning and often returns after supper is long over, too weary to eat what Ann Hall has set aside for him. He has that gift, to choose a course of action, however distasteful, and give himself over entirely to it. When Asia asks, he’s always too busy and too tired to work on Father’s biography. Asia struggles on alone and lonely.
She’s grown used to his company, to hours spent before the fire, reading poetry and imagining grand futures for him, palaces of fame. Like so many boys of his generation, he’d read and reread the adventures of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton. He wants to be a soldier, to be tested, to see himself fired like clay in the great kiln of battle. Instead here he is, only just sixteen, grimly torturing grain from barren ground.
Like Asia, Brother John has a great emotional range. He has a temper. He weeps for his losses. In fits of joy, he throws himself onto the dirt, smelling, tasting, inhaling the ecstatic world. Farmer John lives in a narrow box of miserable responsibility. Asia hardly sees him and hardly recognizes him when she does.
A new crew of men are hired to help with the harvest, the cheapest help available, Irish immigrants. These white men won’t take instruction from Joe Hall. John must manage them. This he’s unable to do.
It’s customary for white hands to share the noontime meal with their employer and his family. It’s customary for the ladies of the household to join them at table. But John feels a great distaste for these men, distaste they quickly reflect back. They dislike him for his British blood. They dislike him for the free and familiar way he deals with the local blacks. They’ve heard that he was bastard-born. Who is he to feel superior to them? Most of them are his elders, some by decades.
John refuses to let Mother, Rosalie, and Asia anywhere near these men. By noon, they’re often stripped down, dirty, smelly, and sweaty, not delightsome, Asia observes primly. Their accents are thick, their conversation uneducated. Dining with such would be an insult to the Booth women, John decides. He makes them keep to the upstairs during the noon meal.
Asia sees in this a beautiful, knightly chivalry. Her own Ivanhoe of the fields. Rosalie is more concerned. She loves and admires John as much as anyone. And she understands that if they ask of him the sacrifice of supporting them, then he must be left in charge, his judgment trusted. A meal with a tableful of male strangers would be a torment to her. Still she worries he’s made a mistake and would force herself to dine downstairs if the choice were hers.
The men gather at the kitchen table in the sweltering house. The women huddle in the even more sweltering bedroom upstairs, eating from plates held on their laps. The butter sweats in its bowl, the women sweat in their dresses. Eggs dry from the edges in as quickly as they can eat them. “Father would have made friends with these men,” Rosalie says in her whisper. “He would have shared a bottle and a story, played the pirate. And so they would have worked hard for him.” She’s not criticizing John. She’s only anxious that he make a success of this and for his own sake. Rosalie recently returned from town with a new saddle as a surprise for him. “When do you imagine I’ll have time to ride?” John had asked her listlessly.