security: a nation of commonwealths; that crumb, that dome, that gilded
pustule, that Idea risen now, suspended like a balloon or a portent or a
thundercloud above what used to be wilderness, drawing, holding the eyes of
alclass="underline" Mississippi: a state, a commonwealth; triumvirate in legislative,
judiciary, executive, but without a capital, functioning as though from a
field headquarters, operating as though still en route toward that high
inevitable place in the galaxy of commonwealths, so in 1820 from its field
p.c. at Columbia the legislature selected appointed and dispatched the three
Commissioners Hinds, Lattimore and Patton, not three politicians and less
than any three political time-servers but soldiers engineers and
patriots-soldier to cope with the reality, engineer to cope with the
aspiration, patriot to hold fast to the dream-three white men in a Choctaw
pirogue moving slowly up the empty reaches of a wilderness river as two
centuries ago the three Frenchmen had drifted in their Northern birchbark
down that vaster and emptier one;
But not drifting, these: paddling: because this was upstream, bearing not
volitionless into the unknown mystery and authority, but establishing in the
wilderness a point for men to rally to in conscience and free will,
scanning, watching the dense inscrutable banks in their turn too, conscious
of the alien incorrigible eyes too perhaps but already rejectant of them,
not that the wilderness's dark denizens, already dispossessed at
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 237
Doak's Stand, were less inveterate now, but because this canoe bore not
the meek and bloody cross of Christ and Saint Louis, but the scales the
blindfold and the sword-up the river to Le Fleur's Bh_iff, the
trading-post store on the high mild promontory established by the Canadian
voyageur, whose name, called and spelled 'Leflore' now, would be borne by
the half-French half-Choctaw hereditary first chief of the Choctaw nation
who, siding with the white men at the Council of Dancing Rabbit, would
remain in Mississi:3pi after his people departed for the west, to become
in time among the first of the great slave-holding cotton planters and
leave behind him a county and its seat named for himself and a plantation
named in honor of a French king's mist ress-stopp ing at last though still
paddling slowly to hold the pirogue against the current, looking not up
at the dark dispossessed faces watching them from the top of the bluff,
but looking staring rather from one to another among themselves in the
transfixed boat, saying, 'This is the city. This is the State';
1821, General Hinds and his co-commissioners, with Abraham DeFrance,
su.)erintendent of public buildings at Washington, to advise them, laid
out the city according to Thomas Jefferson's plan to Territorial Governor
Claiborne seventeen years ago, and built the statehouse, thirty by forty
feet of brick and clay and native limestone yet large enough to contain
the dream; the first legislature convened in it in the new year 1822;
And named the city after the other old hero, hero Hinds' brother-in-arms
on beaten British and Seminole fields and presently to be President-the
old duellist, the brawling lean fierce mangy durable old lion who set the
well-being of the Nation above the White House, and the thealth of his new
political party above either, and above them all set, not his wife's
honor, but the principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not
since, defended, it was, whether or not; -Jackson, that the new city
created not for a city but a central point for the governance of men,
might partake of the successful soldier's courage and endurance and luck,
and named the area surrounding it 'Hinds County' after the lesser hero,
as the hero's quarters, even empty, not only partake of his dignity but
even guard and increase its stature;
And needed them, the luck at least: in 1829 the Senate passed a bill
authoris*nq the removal of the capital to Clinton, the House defeated it;
in 1830 the House itself voted to move to Port Gibson on the Mississippi,
but with the next breath reconsidered, reneged, the following day they
voted to move to
238 WILLIAM FAULKNER
Vicksburg but nothing came of that either, no records (Sherman burned them
in 1863 and notified his superior, General Grant, by note of hand with
comfortable and encouraging brevity.) to show just what happened this time:
a trial, a dry run perhaps or perhaps still enchannelled by a week's or a
month's rut of habit or perhaps innocent of juvenility, absent or anyway
missing the unanimous voice or presence of the three patriot-dreamers who
forced the current and bore the dream, like a child with dynamite: innocent
of its own power for alteration: until in 1832, perhaps in simple
self-defense or perhaps in simple weariness, a constitution was written
designating Jackson as the capital if not in perpetuity at least in escrow
until 1850, when (hoped perhaps) a maturer legislature would be composed of
maturer men outgrown or anyway become used to the novelty of manipulation;
Which by that time was enough; Jackson was secure, impregnable to simple
toyment; fixed and founded strong, it would endure always; men had come
there to live and the railroads had followed them, crossing off with steel
cancellations the age of the steamboat: in '36 to Vicksburg, in '37 to
Natchez, then last of all the junction of two giving a route from New
Orleans to Tennessee and the Southern railroad to New York and the Atlantic
ocean; secure and fixed: in 1836 Old Hickory himself addressed the
legislature in its own halls, five years later Henry Clay was entertained
under the roof; it knew the convention called to consider Clay's last
compromise, it saw that Convention in 1861 which declared Mississippi to be
the third star in that new galaxy of commonwealths dedicated to the
principle that voluntary communities of men shall be not just safe but even
secured from Federal meddling, and knew General Pemberton while defending
that principle and right, and Joseph Johnston: and Sherman: and fire: and
nothing remained, a City of Chimneys (once pigs rooted in the streets; now
rats did) ruled over by a general of the United States army while the new
blood poured in: men who had followed, pressed close the Federal field
armies with spoiled grain and tainted meat and spavined mules, now pressing
close the Federal provost-marshals with carpet bags stuffed with blank bal-
lot-forms on which freed slaves could mark their formal X's;
But endured; the government, which fled before Sherman in 1863, returned in
'65, and even grew too despite the fact that a city government of
carpet-baggers held on long after the State as a whole had dispossessed
them; in 1869 Tougaloo College for Negroes was founded, in 1884 Jackson
College for Negroes was brought from Natchez, in 1898 Campbell College for
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 239
Negroes removed from Vicksburg; Negro leaders developed by these schools
intervened when in 1868 one 'Buzzard' Egglestone instigated the use of
troops to drive Governor Humphries from the executive offices and mansion;
in 1887 Jackson women sponsored the Kermis Ball lasting three days to
raise money for a monument to the Confederate dead; in 1884 Jefferson