He pushed the youngster's hands down and gently took hold of one, squeezing it. "Come on, Boy. Help me pick him up." Hand in hand, they walked forward.
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
July, 1865. Three more freedmen hired, bringing the number to six. Palmetto Bank approved $900 for timber operation. Digging of first saw pit began yesterday. Andy S. supervises work till noon, then cuts in the big stand of cypress with two other men until four, then tills his own plot while daylight lasts. Each new Worker receives five acres, his wage, and a small share of whatever crop or timber we eventually sell.
Nemo's wife, Cassandra, expected more than five acres. Weeping she showed me a bundle of stakes painted red, white, and blue in slapdash fashion. The poor guileless woman gave her last dollar for them. The white peddler who played the trick is long gone. Sad and astonishing how privation brings out the best in some, the worst in others. ...
"Painted stakes?" Johnson fumed.
"Yes, Mr. President. Sold to colored men in South Carolina for as much as two dollars."
Andrew Johnson flung the ribbon-tied report on his desk. "Mr. Hazard, it's disgraceful."
The seventeenth president of the United States was a swarthy man of forty-eight. He was in a choleric mood. His visitor, Stanley Hazard, thought him canaille. What else could one expect of a backwoods tailor barely able to read or write until his wife taught him? Johnson wasn't even a Republican. He'd run with Lincoln in '64 as a National Union Party candidate, to create a bipartisan wartime ticket.
Canaille and a Democrat he might be, but Andrew Johnson still meant to have an explanation. His black eyes simmered as Stanley picked up the report with hands that trembled slightly. Stanley was one of Edwin Stanton's several Assistant Secretaries at the War Department. His particular responsibility was liaison with the Freedmen's Bureau, an administrative branch of the department.
"Yes, sir, it is disgraceful," he said. "I can assure you the Bureau had no hand in it. Neither Secretary Stanton nor General Howard would tolerate such a cruel hoax."
"What about the rumor that inspired the swindle? Every free nigra down there to be given a mule and forty acres by Christmas? Forty acres — his to stake out in patriotic colors. Who spread that story?"
Sweat shone on Stanley's pale, jowly face. Why did Howard, chief of the Bureau, have to be away from Washington, leaving him to answer the summons to the President's office? Why couldn't he speak forcefully, or at least recall some of Howard's religious platitudes? He wanted a drink.
"Well, Mr. Secretary?"
"Sir" — Stanley's voice quavered — "General Saxton assured me that Bureau agents in South Carolina did nothing to inflame the Negroes, create false hope, or spread the rumor."
"Then where did it come from?"
"So far as we know, sir, from a chance remark by —" He cleared his throat. He hated to criticize an important member of his own party, but he had to think of his job, much as he loathed it. "A remark by Congressman Stevens."
That scored a point. Johnson sniffed as though smelling bad fish. Stanley went on. "He said something about confiscating and redistributing three hundred million acres of rebel land. Perhaps that is Mr. Stevens's wish, but there is no such program at the Bureau, nor any intent to begin one."
"Yet the story spread to South Carolina, didn't it? And it enabled unprincipled sharps to sell those painted stakes far and wide, didn't it? I don't think you understand the extent of the mischief, Hazard. Not only is the rumor of forty acres and a mule a cruel deception of the Negroes, but it also affronts and alienates the very white people we must draw back as working partners. I dislike the planter class as much as you —" More, Stanley thought. Johnson's hatred of aristocrats was legendary. "But the Constitution tells me they were never out of the Union, because the Constitution makes the very act of secession impossible."
He leaned forward, like a truculent schoolmaster. "That is why my program for the South consists of three simple points only. The defeated states must repudiate the Confederate war debt. They must overturn their secession ordinances. And they must abolish slavery by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment. They are not required to do more because the federal government cannot, constitutionally, ask more. General Sherman failed to understand that when he confiscated coastal and river lands with his illegal Field Order 15, now rescinded, thank the Almighty. Your Bureau doesn't understand. You talk widely and blithely of the franchise, when qualifying a voter is a matter for the individual states. And no one at all seems to understand that if we threaten to give away their land, we will further harden the hearts of the very Southerners we want back in the fold. Do you blame me for being exercised? I am signing pardons at the rate of a hundred a day, and then I receive that report."
"Mr. President, I must respectfully repeat, the Bureau is not in any way responsible for —"
"Who else spread the promise of forty acres? In lieu of any evident culprit, I hold the Bureau responsible. Kindly convey that to Mr. Stanton and General Howard. Now be so good as to excuse me."
These days Stanley Hazard's life was unremitting misery. To try to make it bearable, he regularly took his first drink before eight o'clock in the morning. He kept various wines and brandies locked in his desk in the old office building temporarily housing the Freedmen's Bureau. If he drank too much during the day, and so misunderstood a question or stumbled or dropped something, he always muttered the same excuse, that he was feeling faint. But he fooled few.
Stanley did have reasons for being wretched. Years ago, his younger brother George had denied him any control of the family ironworks. Deep down, Stanley knew why. He was incompetent.
His wife, Isabel, two years older, was an ambitious harpy. She'd borne him twin sons, Laban and Levi, who were in trouble so often Stanley kept a special bank fund for bribing magistrates and jailers and paying off pregnant girls. The twins were eighteen, and Stanley was desperately shoveling bribe money — Isabel referred to it as "philanthropic donation" — to Yale and to Dartmouth, hoping to get the boys admitted and out of his house. He couldn't stand them.
Nor, paradoxically, could he understand or deal with the enormous wealth generated by his shoe business during the war.
The factory up in Lynn was now on the market. Isabel insisted they get out of the trade, because normal competition was returning. Stanley knew he didn't deserve his success.
Then, too, his former mistress, a music-hall artiste named Jeannie Canary, had deserted him after Isabel discovered the relationship. Jeannie was bound to leave him anyway, Stanley had decided. Many other suitors had as much money as he did, and he was not a good lover; stress and whiskey made it impossible for him to get it up often enough to satisfy her. Miss Canary was rumored to be the mistress of some Republican politician, thus far nameless.
All Stanley had to show for a life of struggle and suffering was more of the same, and a horsy, pretentious wife he faced every night in the huge, beautiful, desolate dining room in their mansion on I Street. So he drank. It kept him going when he was awake. And, mercifully, it put him to sleep.
"Johnson is after the Bureau, is that it, Stanley?"
"Yes. He'd like to see it dismantled. He believes that by acting in accordance with Radical objectives, we're tampering with states' rights."
"I suppose it isn't surprising," Isabel mused. "He's a Democrat and essentially a Southerner. I'm curious about land in the South. Why should it be fought over? Is it that valuable?"