—Charles Sumner
Four years have passed since the Booths last lived in Baltimore. In many ways, the city is the same. The O’Laughlens still live across the street; the little Struthoff grocery is still next door. The parlor in which Father’s body once lay is still wallpapered in flocked yellow, lace curtains at the window, green shutters outside. Pigs still wander at will and remain a contentious political issue. Are they a public menace? Or are they public servants, keeping the streets free of garbage with their omnivorous ways? Visitors from England find them charming, a touch of the Old World, the fairy-tale village here, in a city sometimes referred to as Mobtown.
Because in other ways, Baltimore has changed. The Cock Robins, the Gumballs, and the Neversweats have grown-up and become the Calithumpians, the Rip Raps, the Plug Uglies, the Blood Tubs, the Rosebuds, and so many more. Streetlights have been installed all over the city and that soft glow now drifts in the windows at night, dimming the stars, and puddling on the floors. These streetlights are intended to reduce the danger of being abroad after dark. Forty-two lamplighters have been hired and they are almost never beaten and robbed as they go about their work.
Since the municipal elections of 1854, the anti-immigration American Party, the party of the secretive Know-Nothings, has been in charge of the city. Their agenda includes reforming the police, improving the water supply, and staying in power. These all require muscle, but especially the last. In polling places controlled by the gangs, only members of the party are allowed to cast a ballot. Others may try on pain of death.
The presidential election of 1856 happens mere days after the Booths return. Kansas remains awash in blood and Senator Sumner has been almost killed in a beating on the Senate floor, and still the level of violence in Baltimore shocks the country. Hours of riot and mayhem leave some thirty people dead, another three hundred injured. The O’Laughlens, coming with raisin cakes to welcome the Booths back, warn them to stay inside on Election Day.
Which is what they do. After all, only Edwin is eligible to vote and he’s no Know-Nothing.
When the election is over, the first-ever presidential candidate for the new Republican Party, John C. Frémont, has been defeated despite carrying most of the North. Democrat James Buchanan sweeps the South and Frémont’s own state of California. The American Party nominee, ex-president, ex-Whig Millard Fillmore, takes only one state. That state is Maryland.
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Fillmore has one supporter in the Lincoln household. Not Lincoln, himself—of course, Lincoln supported Frémont. But Mary Todd Lincoln writes to her half-sister, “My weak woman’s heart was too Southern in feeling to sympathise with any but Fillmore. I have always been a great admirer of his, he made so good a President & is so just a man & feels the necessity of keeping foreigners, within bounds. If some of you Kentuckians, had to deal with the ‘wild Irish,’ as we housekeepers are sometimes called upon to do, the South would certainly elect Mr. Fillmore next time . . .”
She is anxious that Lincoln not be mistaken for an abolitionist. Nothing could be further from the truth, she says.
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One year later, Baltimore braces for another municipal election. This time the rioting is mostly contained in the Eighth Ward—that Irish and German district known as Limerick—though some of it spills over into the Fifth and a number of Plug Uglies and Rip Raps travel into DC to menace the voters there.
Large numbers of Baltimoreans have simply stopped trying to vote. “I thought my life of more consequence than voting,” says David C. Piquett, a Democratic candidate for office, who was chased through the streets and shot at. The death count on Election Day is down, but a policeman is murdered. Twenty-four gang members are arrested and charged. They all stand trial. None are found guilty.
Baltimore is one of the last remaining bastions of Know-Nothing power. The national party has collapsed over the issue of slavery. Henry Winter Davis, the man John and Asia had gone to hear in Churchville, now a congressman, argues that slavery is so very divisive, the best way to deal with it is never to mention it.
The city government often appears to take that advice. But the local population of free blacks, estimated now to be more than seventy-five thousand, is concerning to slavers in other parts of the state. Even Davis, who opposes slavery, feels that blacks and whites cannot live together. He himself inherited several human beings and freed them all, but only on condition that they move to Liberia. At this time, Abraham Lincoln also sees Liberia as the answer to the slavery question.
This is not the solution the Maryland slaveholders want. They want the free blacks re-enslaved.
In 1860, a bill proposed by Representative Colonel Curtis Jacob outlines a number of mechanisms through which this might be accomplished. He delivers a lengthy speech on the subject. In it, he castigates the Northern abolitionists as “frenzied vampires,” “literally crazed and mad . . . with the lust for Southern blood.” How long, he asks, must they wait to see someone, anyone, punished for Edward Gorsuch, who went to Christiana to recover his slaves and died there?
He goes on to decry free-Negroism as “an excrescence, a blight,” and then, just to be clear, “a mildew, a fungus.” The free Negroes have no actual rights of citizenship, he says, pointing out that they cannot vote or carry a gun or testify in court or own a dog or attend a church with a black minister or buy alcohol or sell corn or gather publicly or gather privately. Their condition is a freedom in name only. And yet, by their very existence, they destroy the contentment of those in bondage.
Jacob mourns those happy slaves of the past, now infected with the desire for liberty. Universal re-enslavement is the only path back to black contentment. His bill proposes that every Negro emancipated in the last thirty years be returned to their rightful owners without the cost of litigation or any other vexatious delay.
Jacob’s bill is thankfully defeated. But a number of city representatives, including the theatrical manager John T. Ford, spend their own money to publish and disseminate Jacob’s speech. They will not accept this defeat. They will get their message out and try again.
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The Booths are neither oblivious to nor personally affected by these events. Edwin is scarcely home before he leaves again on tour. John’s starting his theatrical career in earnest. June is still in San Francisco with his family. Joe remains at school. The time of the Maryland Booths is coming to an end.
Rosalie
i
In 1856, when Edwin returns from California, Rosalie is thirty-three years old. Re-occupying the house on Exeter entails a spate of housekeeping. November is not the month for these things, and yet the bedding is aired, the curtains washed, the rugs dragged out on the first sunny day and beaten within an inch of their lives. Mother, Asia, and Rosalie work together to polish the house back to their standards. Mother is interviewing candidates for cook and laundress. Someday soon, Rosalie will be a woman of leisure, or at least more leisure than she currently enjoys. In the meantime, she works.
Increasingly, Rosalie feels the need to talk with Edwin on a delicate matter. As she sweeps and dusts, as she runs the tablecloths and curtains through the mangle and returns them to the tables and windows, as she chops the vegetables and grinds the spices and flours the fish, she tries to plan this conversation. She will have to be alone with Edwin—this in itself is difficult to accomplish as neither Mother nor Asia is inclined to let him out of her sight. And then she must find just the right way to say what she wants to say. The Edwin who’s come home is bigger, louder, and more colorful than the Edwin who left. Rosalie is not fooled. Was she not, for many years, practically his mother? She could be blunt with this new Edwin if she didn’t see through his new clothes and mannerisms. Underneath, he is still that little boy with the big, sad eyes who never asked a question if he didn’t already know the answer. Rosalie has never done anything to hurt that little boy and she won’t start now.