Chesapeake (114 page)

All their lives the slaves had heard about Proverbs and Peter, and now even though Reverend Buford glossed them with his special rhetoric, they grew restless. Some stared at the violent movement of his Adam’s apple and whispered, ‘He gonna choke hisse’f!’ and others began to fidget. Buford knew how to handle this; he had two additional arrows in his quiver, and when he shot these at the slaves, they listened, for the first contained a definite threat:

He recited other heavy obligations of the white folk sitting in the shade; this one had examinations to pass at Princeton, that one had to care for
the sick, and he, Reverend Buford, was obligated to the fine people who ran his church. The world was crammed with duties, and some of the lightest were those borne by slaves.

It was his second arrow that gave Buford his peculiar force in pacifying slaves, and it was from this that his famous sermon took its name:

At this point Reverend Buford liked to spend about fifteen minutes describing hell. It was filled primarily with black folk who had sinned against their masters; there was an occasional white man who had murdered his wife, but never anyone like Herman Cline, who had murdered two of his slaves. It was a horrendous place, much worse than any slave camp, and it could be avoided by one simple tactic: obedience. Then the preacher came to his peroration, and it became evident why he insisted upon the attendance of the white masters:

He preferred at this point for the owners to start weeping, for then some of the older slaves would weep, too, and this gave him an opportunity
for a ringing conclusion, with the white folk in tears, the slaves shouting, ‘Amen! Amen!’ and all ending in a rededication to duty.

It was a fine thing to hear Reverend Buford speak; he delivered his
Theft of Self
sermon at eight major plantations, ending at Devon Island, where Paul Steed entertained him in the big house prior to his performance.

‘You’ve matured since we last met,’ Steed said. ‘You’ve become quite a manager,’ Buford responded. ‘Last time it was all books. This time all work.’

‘What do you hear in Virginia?’ Steed asked.

Buford was no fool. He circulated in the best circles and kept his ears open. ‘We find ourselves resisting agitators from both ends.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The abolitionists pressure us from the North to free our slaves, and the secessionists from South Carolina pressure us to leave the Union.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Virginia? We’ll make up our own minds.’

‘To do what?’

For the first time during his foray to the Eastern Shore, Reverend Buford was at a loss for words. He leaned back in his chair, looked out at the lovely gardens, and after a long hesitation, replied, ‘If men like you and me can keep things calmed down just a little longer, we’ll stabilize this agitation. We’ll strike a balance between North and South. Then we can proceed in an orderly—’

‘Slavery?’ Steed broke in.

‘In a hundred years it will fall of its own weight.’

‘Have you read Hinton Helper?’

‘Yes, and I’ve read your retort.’

‘Which do you prefer?’

Again the gaunt reverend fell silent, finally mustering courage to say, ‘Helper. We’ll all be better off when slavery ends.’

‘I have close to a million dollars tied up in my slaves.’

‘Tied up
is the right phrase.’

‘Then why do you continue to give your sermons?’

‘Because we must all fight for time, Mr. Steed. We must keep things on an even balance, and believe me, having several million former slaves running free across the countryside will not maintain that balance.’

‘Answer me directly. Are the Quakers right? Should I free my slaves now.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘When?’

‘In about forty years. Your son Mark seems a steady young man. He’ll want to free them, of that I’m sure.’

‘And my million dollars?’

‘Have you ever really had it? I preach often at Janney’s big plantation on the Rappahannock—’

‘Some of my forebears were Janneys.’

‘I think I heard that. Well, they’re supposed to have a million dollars, too. And they have difficulty finding a few coins to pay me. They’re rich, but they’re poor. And history has a way, from time to time, of shaking the apple tree, and the weak fruit falls off and the owner sees that he never had very many apples to begin with. Not really.’

‘Here you shall be paid,’ Steed said, producing a handfull of bills. ‘I find talking with you most refreshing. I can’t understand how you can preach the way you do.’

‘I’m an old man in an old tradition.’

‘You’re barely sixty!’

‘I go back to a different century. And I dread the one that’s coming.’

His sermon on Devon Island was by far the best of his tour, but it differed from the others because Paul and Susan Steed consented to sit in the shade only if he promised not to refer to them in any way. He therefore had to renounce his heroics and attend to his logic, and he made a stirring case for slavery as an orderly method of fulfilling God’s intentions. At Steed’s request he also stressed the duties of the master to the servant, quoting biblical verses he usually overlooked, but his peroration had the same fire as before, and when he ended, his listeners were in tears and some were shouting, and as he left the podium many blacks clustered around to tell him that he certainly knew how to preach. But as he moved toward the wharf, where a boat waited to deliver him to Virginia, he was accosted by two white people whom he had not noticed during his sermon. Somehow they had slipped into the edges of the crowd.

‘I’m Bartley Paxmore,’ the man said, extending his hand. ‘This is my wife Rachel.’

‘I’ve heard of you two,’ Buford said guardedly.

‘How could thee distort the word of God so callously?’ Bartley asked.

‘Good friends,’ Buford said without losing his temper, ‘we all need time, you as well as I. Are you prepared to bring down the holocaust?’

‘I would be ashamed to delay it on thy terms,’ Rachel said.

‘Then it will not be delayed,’ Buford said. ‘You’ll see to that.’ And he was so eager to escape the tangled passions of the Eastern Shore that he actually ran to his boat and jumped in.

When Elizabeth Paxmore, in her sickbed, heard Bartley’s report of Reverend Buford’s
Theft of Self,
she asked for her Bible and spent a long time leafing through it, sidetracked constantly by coming upon some passage she had memorized in her youth.

At last she cried, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, ‘I’ve found it!’ And when her family gathered, even the grandchildren, who would remember this event well into the next century, she asked, ‘Why do they persist in censoring the one verse in the Bible that seems most relevant?’ And she read from Deuteronomy 23:15:

She said that she wished her family to continue abetting the runaways, even if it took them away from Peace Cliff during what all knew was her last illness. ‘I will be able to fend,’ she assured them.

In 1859 two contradictory events provoked Paul Steed into sitting down and evaluating the economic base on which the Devon plantations rested. The first was the excitement aroused throughout America by the forceful book of a North Carolinian, Hinton Helper, who had the temerity to title it
The Impending Crisis,
as if slavery were in desperate trouble. In this uncompromising work Helper, a southerner with sound credentials, argued that the South must always suffer in competition with the North if it persisted in using slave rather than free labor. He marshaled statistics tending to prove that plantation owners would gain if they freed all their slaves, then hired the men back.

In Maryland the book caused a mighty stir, for these were the years men were choosing sides, and northern propagandists cited Helper to prove their claim that border states would be wise to stay with the Union. Legislation was passed making it a crime to circulate either Helper or
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
and when the freed black who lived next to Cudjo Cater was caught reading a copy of the latter, he was sentenced to ten years in jail.

Many southerners wrote to Steed, reminding him that since his
Letters
had made him a champion of the slaveowners, he was obligated to rebut Helper; the petitioners argued: ‘We know that Helper has used erroneous facts to bolster his fallacious conclusions, and it’s your job to set the record straight.’

He would have preferred to avoid the fight, but a second event intervened, and this forced him to do precisely what his correspondents wanted: undertake to weigh dispassionately the pros and cons of the slave system. What happened was: Southern agriculture had suffered badly in the prolonged depression of the 1840s, and many plantations had neared collapse; it was this period that provided Helper with his statistics, and they certainly did prove that slavery was a burden; but starting in 1851 a veritable boom had developed, and in years like 1854 and 1856, southern
producers of tobacco, cotton, sugar, rice and indigo reaped fortunes.

Now the value of slaves increased; when Paul found it advisable to rent a few from neighbors, he discovered to his amazement that he must pay up to one dollar a day for their services, and provide food, clothing and medical supplies as well. During harvest the price jumped to a dollar-fifty, and he began to wonder whether returns from his crop warranted such outgo: