There was the matter of his departure from Fort Penn, the capital of the Commonwealth and one of its larger cities. Swedish Haven, in 1833, when Moses Lockwood first arrived in the town, was still very much a town in the wilderness. True, there was farming to the west and the south, and only four miles to the northwest lay Gibbsville, with a population of more than 8,000. Gibbsville was reachable by highway, railway, and the canal, but these transportation lanes had been cut through a dense forest; snake, panther, and wildcat country, and on occasion, bear. Strange men, of whom no questions were asked, went from town to town, and these floaters were quite sensibly blamed for the fairly frequent highway robberies and senseless killings that occurred in the area. Moses Lockwood had said he was on his way to Gibbsville when the cloudburst detained him at the Five Points Tavern; but he never told anyone why he was going to Gibbsville. Citizens had to supply their own answers to the question, and they could invent the answers out of what they knew of Moses Lockwood after the manslaughter trial.
The district attorney had called a witness, who was sworn and gave his name, Adam Yoder, Fort Penn. Immediately Moses Lockwood snatched his attorney’s arm and whispered to him, but before the attorney could get his objections sustained, Adam Yoder was able to say, in response to the district attorney’s opening question, “Yes sir, I arrested Lockwood back in 1833.” The defense attorney shouted his objections so that the next words of Adam Yoder were not audible, but it was thereafter common knowledge that Moses Lockwood at least once had been charged with a misdemeanor or a felony. Several business men of Swedish Haven and Gibbsville then went to the trouble of ascertaining by correspondence the nature of the young Lockwood’s offense. It was burglary. Specifically, it was the theft of a cash box from a tavern of dubious reputation in Fort Penn. Moses Lockwood was arrested and put in the lockup, but the tavernkeeper changed his mind about pressing charges and Lockwood was released. Informally, however, he was ordered to leave town, never to return.
This information came too late in Moses Lockwood’s career to be of value to his business competitors. His rise had been rapid, and men who had been on an equal footing with him during his earliest years in Swedish Haven now owed him money or would in all likelihood some day want to borrow from him. Moreover, in doing business with Moses Lockwood they had had to reveal some sharp practices of their own; and what Moses Lockwood did not know of his own knowledge, he could easily find out from his father-in-law, the alternating chief burgess, who possessed a complete record of the citizens’ sins. It was time to concede that Moses Lockwood had reached a new level of importance, that put him out of range of cobblers and blacksmiths, bricklayers and harness makers. Now his dealings were in money, real money, or in its mysterious, capricious ghost, Credit; and the citizens were finding it difficult to remember him as a young roundsman, going about the town in the night, trying doors and keeping the peace.
He had his defenders, if he had no real friends. Whatever he had been or whatever he had done in Fort Penn, he had given good value as a roundsman and in his other enterprises; when he agreed to do something, he did it, promptly, efficiently, and to the extent he contracted for. He was firm in money matters and there was no doubt that he took advantage of his official positions to create business opportunities for himself; but none of this was against the rules that applied in business or politics, and it all gained him respect, the respect for the strong-growing-stronger that silences ethical considerations. He joined a church, attended Sunday services with his wife, and contributed increasing amounts as he prospered. Every man in the borough had his own personal set of ethics, and those who were possibly in a position to be critical of Moses Lockwood’s made a compromise: Moses Lockwood was prospering, perhaps at the cost of strict adherence to a code of honorable conduct, but he was behaving himself, living respectably, and doing so despite and practically in defiance of the man he had been on first arriving in Swedish Haven. He had come to town with a pistol in his pocket, alone and unknown, and he had been set upon by a thief with a dagger; he had killed the thief, he stayed in the town, he took work, he married, he prospered. The second killing was a tragedy of errors, but could not be held against Moses Lockwood. Nor was it, except secretly by every man in the town. In their very midst, in daily association, he was an outcast. No one wanted Moses Lockwood’s friendship after he had killed twice, and the citizens’ efforts to hide that fact—sometimes from themselves—were soon apparent to him, with the curious result that he became more and more devoted to his family, his wife and three children. Every day he tried to make money for them, and most days he was successful.
In 1861 he organized a company of militia, uniformed and equipped out of his own pocket, and as Lockwood’s Rifles they were absorbed into the 7Oth Pennsylvania Infantry. Lieutenant Moses Lockwood was home three months after leaving Swedish Haven, badly wounded in the chest and disfigured by the loss of the lower half of his left ear. He had participated in the battle and the rout at Bull Run. He was past fifty years of age, had learned that war is for young men, but was determined that one young man, his son Abraham, would see none of it. Abraham, now twenty, was at the University of Pennsylvania, where the members of his fraternity were agitating for the mass enlistment of the entire chapter. Moses Lockwood wrote his son:
You have seen what can happen in one battle. I am a comical figure with my cropped ear but not so comical when I try to breathe. I beg of you to heed my advice. Do not enlist now. Finish your schooling for it is to be a long war. Our troops do not posess the fighting spirit of the rebels because the latter are defending there home land & they will fight us to the last man. This war is certin to last another year. Time enough a year from now to enlist. Maybe 2 yrs if England & France join in on the side of the rebels. Also your Mother & Sisters will need you if anything happens to me. You would be head of the Family then. Yr loving Father, Moses Lockwood.
When it became apparent that his prediction of a two-year war was optimistic, Moses Lockwood persuaded his son to apply for a commission. He then, unbeknownst to Abraham, got in touch with Jacob Baltz, member of the House of Representatives for the Lantenengo County district, and talked straight: Baltz would see that Abraham got a commission promptly and was assigned to duty with the War Department in Washington. If this was not done, and done promptly, Moses Lockwood would use all his money and his new prestige as a wounded soldier to run against Baltz. Baltz was amenable, and Abraham Lockwood, second lieutenant, served his country as an aide to a general in the Quartermaster Corps. He was particularly useful as a handsome young guest at the social functions in the foreign embassies. His French was more than adequate to these occasions, and he was a welcome relief from the aging colonels and generals who represented the North at the diplomatic balls. He knew that he had not been chosen accidentally, but he bore his father no resentment. In 1865 he was still alive, and that could not be said of more than half the men in his fraternity.
Abraham Lockwood, not slender but thin, not humorous but witty, not affectionate but concupiscent, had grown from boyhood to manhood in the atmosphere of withdrawal and vigilance that followed his father’s acquittal on the manslaughter charge. Abraham himself was by nature outgoing and gregarious, and he was free to play with boys his own age; but every day he saw his father’s derringer lying beside his watch-and-chain, notecase, pocket handkerchief, small change, and he knew that in the desk drawer at the office and bureau at home his father kept full-size “horse pistols,” always loaded. The business of locking up at night was not a casual routine; and at the new house, after the spike-topped wall was built, Abraham Lockwood’s playmates repeated the fortress jokes their fathers made. He was sometimes proud, sometimes ashamed of the fact that his father had shot two men to death; no other father had participated in a shooting, and Abraham Lockwood was conscious of his playmates’ admiration of his father; but it was his father, not theirs, and he did not like his father to be so very different from other fathers. It would have embarrassed him, too, if his playmates had known that in the privacy of the home his father was gentle, considerate, and generous; while conventional sternness and aloofness and overt cruelty kept most of his playmates in continual fear of their own fathers.