He’s expected back at Mother’s. Instead, much like that wintry evening many months ago, they take up positions on the sofa. This time, he’s the one stretched out; she’s the one with his feet in her lap, the smell of his socks faint in her nostrils. She’s stirred the fire into a blaze and it cracks and snaps and sighs. She has a dull, underwater feeling. The wind outside tosses the tree branches. Their shadows wave like seaweed on the walls.
He tells her a little about the end of his tour. While he was still bedridden, the company moved on to Montgomery, Alabama, where slaves are building a new theater for Canning and his players. John caught up two weeks later, on his feet, but not at his best.
His arrival happened to coincide with a rally for Stephen Douglas, one of four men currently running for the presidency. Douglas’ candidacy is bitterly opposed by William Lowndes Yancey, who controls the Democratic Party in Alabama. Locals call Yancey the prince of the Fire-Eaters. “We want Negroes cheap and we want a sufficiency of them,” he says.
Politics in Montgomery are at a rolling boil—book burnings, bonfires, and effigies, militias arming and training. Yancey is demanding war. It took considerable courage for Douglas to come. He’s pelted with garbage on his way to the venue, and lucky the missiles weren’t something worse.
At this time, John’s still loyal to the Union, his fury split, though not equally, between the abolitionists and the secessionists. Neither, he believes, has the right to threaten the nation, and one night, at a popular bar, he says so. The bar is crowded and smells of hops and ale, tobacco and sweat. John has to speak loudly to be heard. His words occasion a brief silence, then the hubbub of a dozen conversations resumes.
He’s misread the room. At a table in the darkest corner, a plan is immediately hatched to kill him, a plan overheard one table over. Word reaches Canning, who contrives, with the help of Samuel Knapp Chester, a supporting actor in the company, to smuggle John out of town. “I owe Sam my life,” John tells Asia. Asia tries to remember which one Sam is. She thinks he’s a large, balding man whose mustache ends in sharp points. She could be wrong.
John’s made this into quite an exciting story, all politics and devilry and spy-craft. But there’s something hectic in his manner when he tells it, a high-pitched emotion she can’t identify. He seems feverish. She wonders if he’s been this way since he was shot or maybe since he learned some of his beloved Southerners want him dead. She thinks that something has happened and she thinks he hasn’t told her what. She counts on being his confidante. This is her first inkling of a whole world of things he doesn’t tell her.
She’d be even more concerned if she knew that he’s begun to drink. For years, with the examples of Father and Edwin before him, John’s been careful around liquor. That’s all changed. Now John’s the loudest drunk in the bar. When he’d railed against secession, he’d been disgustingly squiffed.
He’s not drunk this evening, but whatever turn in his spirit overrode those years of caution is there when he’s sober as well. It unsettles Asia just enough that she lets him go to Mother’s without sharing her own awful news. Asia is pregnant again.
“I dread it with such terror,” Asia writes Jean. There’s been no time to forget the horrors of Dolly’s birth and, as she’s never recovered fully, this one is bound to be worse. She blames the nurse who pressured her to stop breastfeeding during her fever, despite the pain in doing so. No one explained to her that once her milk dried up, she’d be ripe for pregnancy again. It was a cruelty to both mother and child and not one she’ll soon forgive.
Along with the familiar nausea and exhaustion, depression has wound tightly around Asia like a web she can’t escape. She snaps at Sleeper and Becky and even at Dolly. She cries herself to sleep. She’d believed that John’s visit would raise her spirits, but apparently nothing will do that.
BOOK FIVE
Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off a chicken and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?
—Abraham Lincoln
The Election of Abraham Lincoln
But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”
—Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Speech, 1860
Prior to the election of 1860, politicians in the Deep South warned that if Abraham Lincoln prevailed, they would take it as a declaration of war. His name is kept off the ballot in every Southern state but Virginia. And yet, due to a dysfunctional and divided Democratic Party, on November 6th, Lincoln is elected.
Seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—immediately secede and Jefferson Davis is named president of the Confederacy. This all happens so quickly that Davis’ inauguration precedes Lincoln’s by two weeks.
Lincoln’s route to the capital starts in Springfield and goes through Baltimore, where he’s expected to make a few remarks between trains. But Allan Pinkerton, charged with his security, hears of a plot to assassinate him there. Much of Pinkerton’s information comes from Kate Warne, a member of a new unit of female detectives, specially formed to gather intel through “methods unavailable to men.”
There is much disagreement on the way to handle this threat. Finally, Pinkerton persuades Lincoln to pass through Baltimore secretly on an earlier train and to do so in disguise. It’s a decision Lincoln will quickly regret. Caricatures and newspaper columns make a mockery of his costume and his cowardice—his enemies never forget how he sneaked into Washington. Evidence of the assassination plot seems suddenly thin. All this may partly explain why Lincoln was so often careless about the possibility of assassination later.
On April 12th, 1861, the South Carolina militia takes Fort Sumter and the war begins. The first battle is essentially bloodless. Following Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee also secede.
The killing starts in Baltimore. Although Maryland does not secede, pro-secessionist sentiment is strong there. So is pro-Union sentiment. The city is a powder keg.
On April 19th soldiers from Massachusetts are on their way to Washington to answer Lincoln’s appeal. Like Lincoln before them, they must pass through and change trains in Baltimore. They are met by a well-heeled mob; not the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs, these are men of property and standing. Four soldiers are killed—two of them shot, one beaten to death, and one hit by the storm of stones thrown his way. Twelve rioters also die.
The governor decides that the best way to keep the peace is to prevent Lincoln from routing more troops through Maryland. He orders the railroad bridges to the north and northeast burned, an aggressive move that cuts the capital off.
Troops from Philadelphia sail into Annapolis and take control. Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus and Maryland becomes, essentially, an occupied land. Officials with Southern sympathies are arrested, the municipal police disbanded. Henry May, who represents Maryland in Washington, denounces the occupation—his people are in chains, he says, meaning, with no sense of irony, his white people. He is himself arrested on suspicion of treason, only to be released some months later without charges.