A Passionate Girl (22 page)

Butler kicked the chips aside and strode back into the gaming room. Robert Johnson reeled to the bar for more bourbon. He ranted to the circle of sycophants who gathered around him about the way he and his father were going to destroy the Radical Republicans in Congress. “We got tricks up our sleeves like you never seen,” he said. “You see this li'l piece of Ireland here? She's from the Fenians. They're gonna take Canada and turn it into states that vote solid for Andy Johnson. Then we're gonna bring the South back to Congress, the loyal South, and the Dem'crats'll be back inna saddle. How you like that?”

I did not like it at all. It was madness to reveal your plans so nakedly to your enemies. I was sure there were enemies or friends ready to sell themselves to enemies in that circle of greedy grinning faces. “Let's go,” I said. “I'm very tired.”

In the carriage, Robert became amorous again. “Hey, listen,” he said, fondling my breasts. “How 'bout a li'l more of that Irish pussy, huh? One good turn deserves another, huh?”

“Remember what Mr. Seward said about privacy.”

“Ah, t'hell with Seward 'n rest of'm. No one's gonna touch ole Bob Johnson now.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “When you're not so drunk.”

“Okay. T'morra and next day and next day. I like pass'nate—Irish—girls.”

He passed out on my shoulder. By the time we reached the Willard Hotel he was snoring. I told the driver to take him to the White House.

I spent the rest of the night in my bed, staring into the darkness while images of lust swirled before me to be consumed by gusts of mocking laughter to be in turn devoured by anguished remorse. For the first time I understood the fatality that tormented Dan McCaffrey as he looked at his life. He, too, had tried to ride—and had been ridden down by—Fernando Wood's whirlwind of history. He, too, experienced the double dread, regret for the past and fear of the future.

Dan had emerged from the cyclone of war with nothing but his courage. Another kind of wind was rising now, a political storm, that threatened to wreck me and him and many others in new but no less deadly ways. What could a woman do to survive the upheaval? I remembered the image of my sister Annie's benefactor, Mrs. Ronalds, contemptuous in her white lace and diamonds. I vowed to abide by her dangerous maxim: Keep the heart cold and private.

Three weeks later, I stood on a street corner in Charleston, South Carolina, and watched a drunken Union sergeant cut the silver buttons off the uniform of a Confederate brigadier general while a crowd of laughing Negroes watched. Beside me Dan McCaffrey growled and started for the sergeant. I stayed his arm. “Do you want to get us both killed?” I hissed. The sergeant reeled across the street and stopped, recognizing me. He handed me the buttons. “Three cheers for Ireland,” he said in a thick brogue. “A wee souvenir for the Fenian girl.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now get along with you and sleep off that head.”

He reeled past us into the nearest saloon. I gave the buttons back to the brigadier. “I'm very sorry,” I said. “Please forgive him.”

The brigadier, a short, slim gray-haired man, nodded. “It's all right, young lady. It gave me a little practice. We're goin' to have to get used to forgivin' a lot of things.”

Around us spread a city of ruins, of houses and churches with gaping holes in roofs and walls, of hundreds more houses vacant, of rotting wharves, of miles of grass-grown streets in which pigs rooted and army mules grazed. Southerners like the brigadier wandered these streets with crushed faces, vacant stares. The few women who ventured from their houses wore dresses made of crude homespun fabrics, dyed with vegetable juices. The spirits of both men and women seemed utterly broken, beyond anything I had seen in Ireland.

But the most astonishing sight to my eyes was not the defeated natives, nor the thousands of victorious blue-clad Union soldiers strolling about or marching briskly along the street in squads. It was the Negroes. They were more numerous than the soldiers, wandering in aimless swarms, congregating in crowds on corners and in vacant fields, playing banjos and singing or gambling at dice or dancing on improvised platforms. They formed huge mobs in front of the Freedmen's Bureau offices, where civilian employees of the federal government distributed rice and cornmeal to them. This black presence filled the ferocious summer heat with a special darkness. It dazed the eye and staggered the mind.

The whirlwind of history was sweeping me in a new direction. We had arrived in Charleston by boat two days earlier. It was our second stop (our first had been Wilmington, North Carolina) on our tour to recruit volunteers for the Fenian army and sell bonds of the Irish Republic. Shortly before we left Washington, D.C., the head center and council of the Fenian Brotherhood had announced the “final call,” the signal for an all-out campaign to raise an army and strike a blow to liberate Ireland. They refrained from saying where the blow would be struck, preferring to keep their plans to invade Canada secret.

In spite of the shattered condition of the region, it made good sense to go south. Thousands of the Irish soldiers in the armies occupying the conquered states were soon to be discharged and were ripe for our appeal. They had their pockets full of greenbacks and little on which to spend them. We had a letter signed by President Johnson, urging Union army officers to show us “every courtesy”—meaning give us an opportunity to address their troops.

Dan McCaffrey was with us as proof of our readiness to recruit Southern as well as Northern soldiers. I was there to win publicity in the newspapers and report on the woes of bleeding Ireland. John O'Neil was our speechmaker. He had sent Mrs. O'Neil back to Nashville (to my vast relief). Red Mike Hanrahan was our speech-writer, shepherd, and sachem.

The day after we arrived in Charleston, we arranged to speak to Union troops at their camp outside the city. There were about two thousand Irishmen in the garrison, and they flocked to the platform we made from some planks and two borrowed wagons. I spoke first. I talked of evicted tenants, brutal landlords, and greedy gombeen men, then narrated my adventure with Dan McCaffrey. I ended my vaudeville with a display of marksmanship, for which Dan called out the scores. The soldiers seemed to love it, though I suspect they enjoyed the display of my shape as I aimed the gun far more than my score.

Then came John O'Neil. He positioned himself between the green Fenian flag on his left and the Stars and Stripes on his right and exalted the courage of the Irish soldier in the war just ended, especially the exploits of the famed Irish Brigade. He described the charge of these men up Marye's Heights at the battle of Fredericksburg. They had been mowed down in swaths by Confederate fire, and one of the regiments left its green flag on the field, clutched in the cold hands of its dead color bearer.

A young Irishman in the Southern ranks crept out that night after the battle, cut the flag from its staff, and swam across the Rappahannock River to return it to the commander of the brigade, General Thomas Francis Meagher. He discovered the lad had been wounded in the leg by Union sentries who had fired on him when he did not know the password. Meagher called his own doctor to dress the wound and offered the lad the chance to go north as a free man. He refused and swam back across the river, wounded leg and all, to rejoin General Lee's army.

“Will any man here doubt,” John O'Neil cried, “that with such men united under Ireland's green flag, we cannot defeat the Sassenach's mercenaries?”

The speech produced storms of applause and over five hundred volunteers. We sold ten thousand dollars in Irish bonds. It was encouragement when we needed it most. Everything else about the trip thus far had been disheartening and disillusioning. If it had not been for Red Mike, with his perpetual fooling, we would have been at each other's throats. Dan and John O'Neil found it hard to agree on any aspect of the war. With me, Dan spent his time glowering and examining my mail for letters from Washington, D.C. I had spent a wild week in the capital as Robert Johnson's passionate girl. I had mastered my distaste for him to play the courtesan, pretending a fervor that I utterly lacked. Dan had watched, appalled and disgusted. I was tempted to tell him that no one could equal my own disgust. But I was still at war with Dan in my heart—and Robert Johnson promised to be a powerful ally in the larger war with England.

His enthusiasm for our Canadian adventure was boundless, and his letters assured me that he was doing everything in his power to keep the president's support strong. I replied with burning epistles of endearment, interlarded with the ease with which we were selling bonds and recruiting men for our Canadian expedition.

I also told Robert that I could see no evidence of a disposition to further rebellion in the South. This was almost as important as our recruiting activity. I had no illusion, of course, that Robert or the president was relying on my information. Robert had told me that they had a number of confidential correspondents, in particular Benjamin Truman of the
New York Times,
sending them reports on the South. If the region remained pacified, and their delegates were readmitted to Congress quickly, the president's ability to support our Canadian expedition would be immensely strengthened. Friends like Fernando Wood, at present part of a weak Democratic minority in Congress, would rise to power.

One might think I was riding high, playing at such grand strategy, but there were terrible doubts about the great stakes and frequent bouts of remorse for the part I played. I wondered how long Robert Johnson could retain any influence unless he got better control of his drinking and his egotism. I found myself remembering his crass hand on my breast or thigh, the crude way in which he took me, with no interest whatsoever in my pleasure. Though I struggled against it and vowed my heart was un-violated, I felt a wound in my spirit that I knew not how to heal.

I tried and to some extent succeeded in forgetting it through my fascination with the amazing range of new sights and experiences our journey south opened to me. Thanks to my stay in Washington, D.C., I knew the inside story of the struggle that was raging north and south between men who wanted to follow the forgiving policy of the murdered Lincoln and those who favored the vengeful policy of the Radical Republicans. For a personal barometer of Southern feelings, I had Dan McCaffrey. Everything he saw in Wilmington and now in Charleston filled him with saturnine gloom.

The day we watched the brigadier lose his buttons, we were on our way to a meeting with one of Dan's war time commanders, Wade Hampton. He received us in the parlor of a once opulent house not far from Charleston's fashionable waterside promenade. With him was another Carolinian, Benjamin Franklin Perry, whom President Johnson had recently appointed the provisional governor of the conquered state.

The house was a kind of image of the ruined South. Nothing had been repaired for years. Chairs with missing legs tilted crazily; ripped couches sagged; stopped clocks stared silently. Carpets were in tatters; the windows were bare, their curtains long since used for clothes. Broken panes were covered by boards.

Wade Hampton was a tall, muscular man with a remarkably handsome leonine head. Dan regarded him with much of the same awe he had felt for his original commander, Jeb Stuart. Hampton had succeeded Stuart as chief of the Confederate cavalry. Before the war, Hampton had been the richest man in South Carolina, with thousands of slaves and vast estates. He had not favored secession, but he had loyally followed the majority will of his countrymen, sacrificing his fortune to support the Confederacy.

Hampton was still wearing his uniform. He shook Dan's hand with great warmth and expressed his pleasure at meeting me. He introduced us to Governor Perry, a small, dark, rather volatile man, with impatience and considerable bitterness on his face.

“I wish I could welcome you to my own home,” Hampton said, “but it's in ashes. I don't have a suit of clothes to my name, nor scarcely a dollar of ready money. Most of my friends are in the same condition.”

Dan nodded, swallowing hard. “General,” he said, “if you knew it was goin' to be like this, would you still have surrendered?”

“Yes, I think so,” Hampton said.

“I just saw a Union sergeant cut the buttons off the coat of a brigadier general of the infantry.”

“Such things will happen for a while.”

“If I knew things like that were comin', I would have kept fightin'. So would every man I commanded.”

“Then you'd be dead and unable to do anyone a service,” Hampton said in his sad, soft voice. “No, General Lee made the right decision. The South needs every man it has left if it's to salvage anything from the wreckage.”

He hesitated, embarrassed by the contradiction between that thought and the purpose of our visit. “I gather from your letter that you're serving another embattled cause.”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said. “The Fenian army of the Republic of Ireland. We ain't got a country and we ain't got an army, but we're gonna have one soon enough. I'd like to see some regiments of southern Irishmen in it.” He told him of the plan to attack Canada. “General,” he said, “if you'd make a statement recommendin' us, I think we'd get every Irish soldier in this state who still had two legs and two arms, plus a few with stumps.”

“I'm flattered, Major McCaffrey,” Hampton said, “but I doubt if such a statement would be good policy for either you or me. It would be regarded with suspicion by our conquerors. I'm still an unpardoned rebel. We've been whipped, Major, and we must walk low for a while.”

“Why don't you recruit the niggers?” Governor Perry said. “We'll pay you a dollar a head to get rid of them, and no one would ask any questions if they all froze to death in Canada the first winter.”

“I don't agree with you, Governor,” Wade Hampton said. “As slaves our blacks were faithful. Could we have left our women and children in their power and spent four years fighting in Virginia and Tennessee if we didn't trust them? We need their labor as free men. If we deal with them fairly, we can make them useful citizens.”

“You favor giving them the vote?” Perry said.

“Those who can read and write. It will disarm our enemies to the north.”

“No nigger will ever vote in South Carolina while I'm governor,” Perry said.

Hampton sighed. “These young people aren't interested in our differences. They're in pursuit of other dreams, other glories. Let us wish them better fortune than we've had.”

We thanked him and departed. Only dimly did I realize then that I had heard the argument that was tormenting the South and would soon trouble America—how to deal with the four million freed slaves. I only knew—and knew I disliked—the savage hatred of the blacks that I heard in Governor Perry's voice. I was dismayed to hear it echoed by Dan.

“General Hampton's crazy,” he muttered as we walked past the crowds of blacks in the hot streets. “Give one nigger a vote and they'll all want it. Next thing we'll be sittin' down to dinner with them.”

“You sound like an Englishman talking of Irishmen,” I said.

“What the hell do you mean?” he growled.

“Where else in the world are people despised in the mass, but Irish by English?”

“Niggers are different,” he said. “Can't you see that by lookin' at them? They won't work if they ain't driven to it.”

“Exactly what the English say about us.”

“Are you tellin' me an Irishman's the same as a nigger?” he snarled.

“I'm telling you not to slander any people or race wholesale. It's an ignoramus's way of thinking.”

In a rage, Dan seized a fat black man who was strolling past us with a slim coffee-colored young woman on his arm. “Hey, boy,” he said. “What do you think of the Jubilee? You like bein' a free man?”

“Sure do,” he said.

“What sort of work you goin' to do?”

“I don't rightly know. Not much work to be done around here. When Uncle Sam gets me my forty acres and my mule, reckon it'll be time to work.”

“How you eatin' now?”

“Why, at the Bureau. They tell us not to worry, Uncle's goin' to take good care of us.”