Chesapeake (104 page)

Finally the two old men on the topmost bench rose and shook hands. Then all the Quakers shook hands with their neighbors, and each moved forward to sign the marriage document, which would be deposited in the place of record in Easton. When the signing ended, Bartley Paxmore had been duly married to Rachel Starbuck.

BY THE MIDDLE YEARS OF THE 1840s CITIZENS LIVING
along the Choptank had separated into two well-defined groups epitomized by the two leading families of the region. Paul and Susan Steed had become the acknowledged champions of those wealthy plantation owners who were convinced that Maryland must follow the guidance of the Carolinas and Georgia, even if this meant dissolving the Union, while George and Elizabeth Paxmore were spokesmen for that great body of middle-class farmers and businessmen who felt that the Union was something unique and precious which must be preserved. In financial and intellectual power the Steed faction predominated; in stubborn moral force the Paxmore group would prove important.

Most of the time the Steed-Paxmore paths diverged, the former attending to their plantations, the latter to the building of ships; but at unpredictable times their interests converged, and then there was trouble.

In these years Devon became one of the best-regarded plantations in America. Three reasons accounted for this. First, Paul Steed gave it statesmanlike management, seeking out the best overseers in Maryland and Virginia and paying them well. He himself now owned nearly nine hundred slaves and used them to maximum advantage. There were no beatings, no savagery; after he discovered how Mr. Cline operated his correctional farm on the Little Choptank, no more Devon slaves went there. His wise decisions helped his plantation to prosper; he alternated crops, kept his ships busy and extended the number and range of his stores. His years of quiet study had enabled him to become an expert, and he was often seen limping about the remotest corners of his mainland plantations, pushing his twisted neck into all sorts of problems, which he took delight in solving.

Second, on a trip across the bay in 1842 he chanced to see the operation of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and was so enchanted by the prospect of linking the nation together by rails that for no reason at all other than scientific curiosity he rode the train to Harpers Ferry and back. That experience convinced him that the only hope for the peninsula of which the Eastern Shore was a part lay in binding its three segments together by means of an extensive rail system.

From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called State of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America.

All who lived in this tripartite travesty kept hoping that in the forthcoming year the three sections would be united to form a viable state with its own interests, history, traditions and prospects. Year after year it failed to happen. Paul campaigned in Congress for the sensible realignment and everyone he approached agreed that the change should be made, but nothing was done, for, as Senator Clay told him one afternoon, ‘My dear Steed, the most permanent thing in this world is a temporary arrangement.’

But now, with the possibility of a rail system running the length of the peninsula and connecting with the North at Philadelphia and the South via Norfolk, the Eastern Shore had a bright future, and the organizer and marshal of that future would be Paul Steed. It was in pursuit of this grand design that he and Susan began to invite the leaders of the nation to visit with them at Devon. The Steed sloop would cross the bay, sail down to the mouth of the Potomac, then up to Washington, where it would wait to carry famous senators and congressmen to Rosalind’s Revenge for a week or ten days’ entertainment. While the visitors philosophized, Paul would bring in leaders from the Choptank to talk persuasively with them.

The locals cited every reason that a logical man could devise as to why the three fragmented parts should be united, and they accomplished nothing except the pleasure of meeting great men and listening to them talk. How often in those pregnant years did the senators speak for two minutes on the problem of uniting the Eastern Shore, and then orate for five hours on the insoluble problems of slavery!

Third, it was in this field of burgeoning interest in slavery that Steed did most to bring favorable attention to Devon. He began innocently: a long, analytic letter to Fithians in London explaining that whereas it might be appropriate for England to abolish slavery, it would be suicide for the American South to do so. Noel Fithian replied with a scholarly
analysis of certain weaknesses in his friend’s reasoning, and Paul sent back a rebuttal.

Later he corresponded with gentlemen in Massachusetts, Ohio, Louisiana and, especially, South Carolina. His letters were so beautifully composed and so instinct with logic and high argument that they circulated among friends of the recipients, and chance readers from different parts of the country wrote Paul suggesting that he compile his letters and offer them as the statement of a southern realist, but it was not until Senator Calhoun of South Carolina wrote, that Steed became actively interested. With his customary perspicacity, the great defender of states’ rights and slavery told Paul:

In 1847 Paul issued his collection of twenty letters,
Reflections of a Maryland Planter,
which evoked such enthusiastic praise in the South and such rebuttal at the North that many readers wanted to know how a parochial planter like Steed, stuck away in one of the most remote corners of the nation, could have mastered so much learning. The explanation was simple.

In the dark years of his soul’s retreat, when all along the Choptank he was ridiculed for his relations with the slave girl Eden and his reluctance to intervene in his wife’s scandalous behavior, he found consolation in the work of three authors who had molded his education. Jean Jacques Rousseau reminded him anew of the honorable condition in which men might live if they attended to the basic lessons of the soil. From Rousseau he derived his passionate love of human freedom and his determination to protect it in both the South and the North. Plato reminded him of those noble propositions upon which any orderly society must be founded. But he learned most from the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

Like many southern gentlemen, he found in Scott’s works a defense of those principles upon which the nobility of southern life was based: the brave laird of good intention, the chaste woman who inspires him and whom he protects, the loyal serf whose willing work enables the laird to monitor the land, and the allegiance of all to the ideals of an unselfish chivalry. On one memorable afternoon in 1841, as he sat in the lace-curtained room reading
The Heart of Midlothian,
he rose to his feet and took an oath: Here on this island I can be a new Guy Mannering, a local Quentin Durward.

From that solemn moment he dedicated himself to achieving Plato’s
good society, Rousseau’s freedom and Walter Scott’s chivalry. It was inevitable that his letters should epitomize these beliefs, and in his first epistle to Noel Fithian, when he addressed himself to the most difficult topics that were troubling the nation, he was not afraid to spell out his personal convictions:

In his twenty letters, Paul invariably referred to the South, capitalized, and its unhappy persecution by those ‘at the north,’ not capitalized, as if the former were a spiritual entity and the latter a chance combination of miscellaneous agencies. But he never ridiculed the northern position and in Letter VIII actually stated it rather better than some of its own apologists. The letter which gained widest circulation, however, was
XIII, in which he dealt head-on with the charge of southern cruelty to the slave. This was reprinted a thousand times in southern newspapers, and served as the focus for a thousand rebuttals in northern ones. A particular paragraph became famous:

In a later section of the same letter he did admit that unspeakable types such as Mr. Cline existed, and that on their farms ugly incidents had sometimes taken place, but he dismissed their brutality with a phrase that gave scant consolation to the Negroes who suffered under their lash: ‘They dare not associate with gentlemen.’ He implied that this was punishment enough; but he also added that every southern state had strict slave codes, ‘which all but the most depraved observe,’ and he cited Maryland’s to prove that under its benevolent protection a slave might have to work hard, but he was well fed, warmly clothed, comfortably housed and defended against abuse.

By accident, the other letter which achieved considerable notice outside the book was XIX, which he had composed in a fit of some irritation. The slave Frederick Douglass, who had been born on a plantation just off the Choptank, and who had served at various sites adjacent to the Steed holdings, had escaped north and been adopted by the more unsavory elements of the abolition movement. In 1845 he published a scurrilous book purporting to give a true account of slavery in the Choptank district, and through it he had achieved a certain notoriety as a speaker in northern churches. The South was both vexed and damaged by this book, for Douglass wrote compellingly; it was believed in Patamoke that some white man must have written the book for him. So in a letter to a friend in Ohio, Paul Steed demolished the pretentions of this rabble-rouser. He savaged him on four counts, which he outlined at the beginning of his letter: