Chesapeake (111 page)

The town of Patamoke had now assumed its final shape. Everything centered on the harbor, which provided not only a good anchorage for ships but also a focus for all life within the town, now composed of 1,836 citizens. Businesses lined the north rim of the harbor. On the street behind this thoroughfare stood three impressive governmental buildings—the courthouse, the jail and, in between, the new slave market, a spacious area covered with a roof but not walled in along the sides.

Along the eastern edge of the harbor stood the rambling buildings of the Paxmore Boatyard, and to the west, as so often happened in American towns, gathered the better residential homes; the combination of a grand view of the river and the clean breezes from the south made this area desirable, and here the white owners of the town lived. In between were the small houses of the artisans, the mariners, the retired farmers and the boardinghouse keepers.

These major dispositions had been agreed upon more than a century ago; what made Patamoke of 1855 different was that two new vital elements had been added. To the north, beyond the business district, the Irish families clustered, and they had had either the gall or the gumption to build for themselves a rather large Catholic church, in which services were conducted by a flamboyant priest from Dublin. As several townsmen observed, ‘In the old days Catholics were gentlemen who dined with candlelight on Devon Island. Now they’re real people, and very noisy.’ The Steeds viewed this new development not with outright distaste, but with a large degree of bewilderment. None of the family was easy with the brash young priest, for he preached a Catholicism quite strange to those whose forebears hobnobbed with the Lords Baltimore.

The other innovation stood on a marshy point east of the boatyard, where a collection of cabins and shanties had grown up. It was called Frog’s Neck and was occupied principally by freed blacks, with a few
lean-tos for the slaves who were hired out by the day to businesses in Patamoke. Sometimes a man or woman would work away from the home plantation for two or three years at a time, never seeing a salary, which was paid directly to the owner. However, if an enlightened owner like Paul Steed rented out one of the Devon slaves, he saw to it that the slave received part of his wage, and several had earned enough in this way to purchase their freedom. There was formal contact between the black area and the boatyard, some with the business section, quite a lot with the residential area in which many of the slaves worked, but absolutely none with the Irish district.

There was, of course, a final area, but it was not delineated. Its inhabitants lived where they could, some with the Irish, some in shacks within the business district and some with the blacks. These were the poor white trash. There were forty-one Turlocks scattered about Patamoke and no one could unscramble the relationships that existed among them.

It was a good town, and during those very years when extreme passions excited the rest of the nation it flourished in peace. A pragmatic harmony infused the place, accountable in major part to the exemplary behavior of its two principal citizens. Paul Steed ran a good plantation at Devon and a better store in Patamoke; he gave employment to many of the Irish and good prices to all. He was firm in his support of slavery as a principle and of the Whig Party as the salvation of the country, but most of all he was a force for balance. When in town over the weekends he attended Mass, sitting alone in the second row of benches, an austere, proper little man with his head cocked to one side as if he were weighing what the priest said.

The other leader, George Paxmore, was an old man now, straight and white-haired at seventy-two. He no longer worked at the boatyard on a daily basis, but he did come in from Peace Cliff now and then to satisfy himself that the building of ships was progressing in an orderly manner. At the yard he tended to employ blacks rather than Irishmen, but he had helped the latter substantially in building their church and he subscribed generously to any collections they made for their many charities. He deplored their drinking, envied their lightness of heart. It was he who arranged for Michael Caveny to become town constable, and never regretted this act, for Caveny proved himself to be a rough-and-ready character who preferred to talk a man into proper behavior rather than use a gun—‘Sure, a man like you who beats his wife should grow a larger beard, Mr. Simpson, for how dare he look at his face in a mirror?’

The settled relationships of this little town were shattered one hot afternoon when T.T. Arbigost, in his white linen suit and silver toothpick, drifted into the harbor aboard a dirty steamer from Baltimore, unloading seventeen slaves, whom he stowed in the pens at the market.
This done, he brushed himself off, looked contemptuously at the miserable ship he had left, and dispatched information to Devon Island that he had acquired a fine lot of primes from the plantations of southern Maryland.

Since the Steed plantations could always use more hands, Paul sailed to Patamoke prepared to buy the lot, but when he inspected them they appeared to be in such excellent condition that he could not fathom why Arbigost had brought them here rather than to the more profitable markets in Louisiana.

‘Well, yes,’ the unctuous dealer agreed, rocking back and forth in his chair at the market. ‘That’s the penetrating kind of question I’d ask if I came upon fine specimens like this.’ With his riding crop he pointed casually at the blacks standing in the pens.

‘No doubt they’ve proved intractable,’ Steed suggested.

‘There you’re wrong!’ Arbigost said with an ingratiating smile. ‘Would I risk a trip across the bay in that …’ With his toothpick he indicated the ship.

‘What’s your secret?’

‘Money, Mr. Steed. Plain, ordinary money.’

‘You’d get more in Louisiana.’

‘And lose it on the cost of the trip. Mr. Steed, wherever I went in Baltimore they told me, “Steed of Devon, he needs slaves.” You’re well known, sir.’

Paul wanted to make the purchase, but when he inspected the men he could not accept the testimony standing before him. ‘These are intractable men that you’ve smuggled in from Georgia.’

‘Mr. Steed!’ the wily dealer protested, and cleverly he evaded the matter of provenance, concentrating on the question of tractability, and it was what he finally said in pursuit of this strategy that inflamed Patamoke. ‘Have I ever in my life sold you a recalcitrant nigger?’ He paused dramatically to allow Steed time to acknowledge his exemplary behavior, then revealed an additional bit of evidence in his favor. ‘Remember when I sold your Mr. Beasley that fine Xanga who answered to the name of Cudjo and was so good at machinery? Mr. Beasley had identical doubts about the Xanga, but I assured him then, as I assure you now, that Cudjo was broken … that he would prove to be a good slave.’ He smiled, poked Paul on the wrist with his toothpick, and added, ‘What I didn’t tell Mr. Beasley then, because there was no need for him to know, was that it was this very Cudjo who led that famous mutiny aboard the
Ariel
Remember?’

‘The
Ariel?’

Mr. Arbigost nodded. ‘Bloody affair. Entire ship taken.’

Steed sat heavily upon the block from which the slaves would be auctioned if he did not buy them at private treaty. ‘That ship was built
here. The dead captain was from this town.’ It was incredible! Cudjo Cater had led that mutiny, and Paul Steed had set him free.

‘But didn’t he turn out to be an excellent slave?’ Mr. Arbigost wheedled. ‘And I promise you, Steed, these men will prove the same, because on my farm we have ways of training slaves.’

Paul wanted to run away from this insidious man in his prim, high-buttoned suit, but he needed slaves, and now Mr. Arbigost shifted his silver toothpick to the corner of his mouth and made a striking offer: ‘We could haggle over individual men—up this, down that—but as gentlemen that would be unsavory. For a flat twenty-one hundred dollars each they’re yours.’

After the slaves had been marked for shipment to the far plantations, Steed warned Arbigost that it would be prudent if nothing was said about Cudjo and the
Ariel.

‘I’ve already told the men handling the slaves.’

‘Then we’re in for trouble,’ Steed said, and he decided not to return to Devon but to sleep in Patamoke. He was at the house adjoining the store when Lafe Turlock, accompanied by his five sons, grown men now, stormed up to the door, demanding to see him.

Lafe was an old man, bent of shoulder and slack of jaw, but he had the marsh fire. ‘Steed, they tell me it was yore nigger Cudjo that took the
Ariel.’

‘So Mr. Arbigost reports.’

‘We’re gonna hang him. He killed my cousin Matt.’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘Because we want you to come along. Hold back the constable.’

‘I think Mr. Caveny will do his duty.’

‘We think so, too, and we don’t want no trouble.’

‘Aren’t you threatening to cause a good deal of trouble?’

‘All we’re gonna do is hang a nigger. We ain’t gonna rile up the community.’

‘I should think that would rile the community considerably.’

‘Not when we tell ’em what he done.’

Paul retreated into his house and asked the Turlocks to join him. Going into the kitchen, he whispered to his serving girl to run and tell Mr. Paxmore and Cudjo Cater what was afoot. Then he returned to talk with the Turlocks. He accomplished nothing. Lafe insisted that he would personally tie the rope about Cudjo’s neck, and the boys urged him on.

So the meeting broke up, with Steed refusing to join the lynching party. When he last saw the gang of six they were fanning out across the community to assemble their mob.

Paul thought for some minutes as to what he must do, and in the end decided to seek Mr. Caveny. The constable had been alerted to the Turlock uprising and instantly recognized that here was the first test of
his power in this town. To him the
Ariel
was merely another ship, the mutiny a trivial incident far less significant than the starvation he had seen in Ireland. He calculated that most of the citizens of Patamoke would feel the same way and that he would be allowed a relatively free hand in dealing with this rambunctious family.

But when Mr. Steed arrived, obviously frightened, the planter’s anxiety infected the constable. Then Mr. Paxmore walked in, tall and quiet. ‘We want no riots,’ he said. ‘Mr. Caveny, is thee prepared to defuse this mob?’

‘It’s only six,’ Caveny said.

‘There will be more,’ Paxmore said. ‘We’d better go out to Frog’s Neck.’

So the three men walked slowly and without visible agitation through the streets from the jail to the marshy point, and there they found that all the blacks had fled except Eden and Cudjo Cater.

‘We stayin’,’ Eden said as the three white men approached.

‘Thee must show no weapons,’ Mr. Paxmore warned.

‘We stayin’,’ the black woman said, and it appeared from her manner that she was well armed. Cudjo said nothing, just stood by the door of his cabin.

‘Were you aboard the
Ariel?’
Steed asked. ‘I be.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Steed shook his head. This was going to be a bad night.

Then the Turlocks appeared, and it seemed as if half the town sided with this wild family. But as they came nearer, Paul saw something which enraged him even more. Marching in front, side by side with Lafe Turlock, was Mr. Arbigost, who obviously felt that the disciplining of blacks anywhere, anytime, was his concern.

‘Arbigost!’ Steed shouted. ‘What in hell …’

‘We want that nigger,’ Lafe roared, but Mr. Steed ignored him. ‘Arbigost! What are you doing with these men?’

And now the heat of the evening was diverted from Turlock to the stranger in the white suit, and a brief, impassioned dialogue took place, during which tempers had a chance to subside.

‘Gentlemen!’ Mr. Caveny said when the first exchange ended. ‘Sure, it would be a shame to spoil a summer’s evenin’ like this. I’m proposin’ we all go back to town and have free drinks on Mr. Steed.’

‘I want that nigger.’

‘Lafe,’ Mr. Steed said. ‘That was a long time ago. Cudjo has proved himself—’

‘I’m gonna hang that nigger, what he done to my cousin Matt.’

It was the utterance of this great name that terminated the riot, for when it was spoken, all turned to stare at Paul Steed, and many in the crowd recalled his shame. Captain Matt, that big, brawling redhead who had once tossed Steed into the harbor.

Steed, well able to guess what the would-be rioters were thinking, took Lafe by the arm, turned him around and said quietly, ‘Why don’t we all go to the store for a drink?’

When the mob receded, Eden went back into the cabin, took the knife from her bosom, the revolver from her dress, and with no display of emotion, placed them on the table. When Cudjo saw them he was terrified by what might have happened, and he sought to sweep them away, but Eden covered them with her arms.

It was in March 1857, when it seemed to everyone in America that the compromise worked out by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster before they died was going to save the nation—everyone, that is, except the bull-headed abolitionists, who would accept nothing less than the shattering of the Union—that Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a Maryland man, read a decision in the Supreme Court which destroyed the shaky edifice behind which the conciliators had been working. In simple, incontrovertible terms the learned Chief Justice, one of the strongest men ever to serve on the court, spelled out the future.

The case, like all those which make significant law, was muddled. This slave Scott, had been born in a slave state, carried into a free one, then carried into a territory where slavery was prohibited, back into a state where it was permitted, and finally into Massachusetts, where slaves were automatically free. What was his status? The court could logically have decided almost anything.

Chief Justice Taney and his associates found an easy, if evasive, escape; they announced that since Dred Scott was black, he was not a citizen of the United States and had no right to defend himself in a federal court. His status reverted to what it had been three decades earlier. He was born a slave and must remain so through life.