Chesapeake (117 page)

From the wharf Paul cried to his son, ‘Take care, Mark. We’ll need you when this is over.’

On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln publicly proclaimed a course of action he had decided upon earlier: all slaves within the states at war against the Union were to be free on January 1, 1863. ‘Thank God!’ Paul Steed cried when he heard this doleful news. ‘At least the idiot had sense enough not to touch ours.’ He was right. Lincoln, who had a personal aversion to blacks and feared they could never be absorbed into a white society, wanted to see them settled somewhere out of the country. He had prudently refrained from liberating those living in important border states like Kentucky and Maryland, whose governments sided with the North; only slaves in states like Alabama and Louisiana were freed. In his relief, Paul wrote to his son, then campaigning along the Mississippi:

The proclamation, which had no force and did not free one slave, did have the power to depress slave prices in border states. Plantation owners along the Choptank asked themselves, ‘If he has the power to free slaves in the Carolinas, why not in Maryland?’ And within one month the value of a prime slave dropped from a high of $2,300 to a low of $900. By the end of December it was $600. In this brief space the Steeds lost seventy percent of their negotiable wealth.

In June the blow fell which the Maryland planters had feared. A scruffy Union vessel put into Patamoke, and a major from Connecticut, wearing a dirty blue uniform, began enlisting slaves into the northern
army. He made a show of seeking permission from the owners and handing them certificates guaranteeing a later reimbursement of $300 per slave, but few believed such promises would be honored.

The invitation to flee servitude and fight against the South was irresistible. Nearly two hundred Steed slaves asked Paul’s permission to enlist, and he was powerless to refuse. But only the strongest were accepted, and when these were marched aboard ship, even those who had been rejected cheered, as if this expeditionary force were destined to win freedom for all blacks.

Paul Steed, watching in dismay as his slaves sailed away, found some solace by comparing this dirty ship, this scruffy major and these black recruits with the Confederate enlistment program conducted earlier at this wharf: That major’s a disgrace. Colonel Janney wouldn’t allow him near his horse. And as for the Negroes who wanted to be soldiers—one Turlock could gun down the lot.

Cudjo Cater, hearing the commotion, left his cabin, and with Eden and his two sons trailing behind, reported to the recruiting officer, ‘I can work a ship.’

‘Grandpop, you’re too old,’ the northerner said. ‘I can work machines.’

‘Grandpop, take a look at the kind of boys we want,’ and when Cudjo continued pestering him, he pointed to rejectees half the old man’s age. ‘Now go back to your master.’

‘I’m free.’

This meant nothing to the recruiter, but then he spied Cudjo’s two sons. ‘Now there’s the type we want. You want to fight for freedom?’ he asked the boys.

Eden pushed them forward. ‘They good fighters,’ she said.

So the two Cater boys were taken, but when the day ended, there was Cudjo, still trying to enlist. This amused the recruiter, who whistled for the major. ‘This man says he’s got to come with us.’

The Connecticut man came to the recruiting area, inspected Cudjo’s teeth and snapped, ‘Hell, this man must be over fifty.’

‘I can work machines.’

‘We don’t need mechanics, old fellow. We need men who can march. Now go back to your master.’

As the ship sailed, Cudjo looked at the willing young men lining the railings and wondered how many of them would be able to march six hundred miles with chains about their necks … and still have strength to capture their ship.

With the strongest male slaves gone and only the rejected and the women left to work his vast plantations, Paul made an effort to keep alive the spirit of Devon. Each night he allowed old Tiberius, now approaching
ninety, to lead him into the dining room in which he had so often entertained. Alone at the head of the table, he would sit erect as two elderly servants in white gloves brought him his meal. Invariably he would look at the chair in which John C. Calhoun had once sat; it stood apart, protected by a betasseled cord of gold.

How sardonic it was, Paul thought, that the three greatest men he had known—Clay, Webster, Calhoun—had each sought the presidency, and been rebuffed: Always we elected men of lesser quality. Dolefully he counted off the grim procession of incompetents who had occupied the White House during these years of crisis: Van Buren, with no character; General Harrison, with no ability; John Tyler, God forbid; Polk, who allowed everything to slip away; General Taylor, lacking any capacity for leadership; the unspeakable Millard Fillmore; Franklin Pierce, who was laughable; James Buchanan, who could have averted this war; and now Abraham Lincoln, traitor to all the principles he once professed.

He recalled fondly the moral greatness of Clay, the grandeur of Daniel Webster, the intellectual superiority of Calhoun, and shook his head: Why must we always reject the best?

And then, when his spirits were at their lowest, the southern armies launched a chain of victories, culminating at Chancellorsville, down the bay, and his hopes revived. General Lee, through sheer brilliance, was defeating superior northern armies, and Mark Steed wrote from one battlefield:

In late June of that year excitement on the Choptank grew, for word filtered back that southern armies were involved in a stupendous march north in an effort to create a pincers which would curl back to engulf Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington itself. The end of the war seemed at hand.

Now Paul climbed to the widow’s walk where his wife had once kept vigil, and fixed his gaze northward, across the bay, toward those unseen battlefields just beyond the horizon, where, as he told his planter friends, ‘Our destiny is being hammered out.’ It was tantalizing; events of supreme significance were under way, but he could hear only echoes, as if the Eastern Shore were not allowed a vital role.

In the first days of July a hush fell over the bay. Mosquitoes swarmed and slave women fished for crabs. Rumors crept in that a mighty battle was engaged at Gettysburg, a few miles north of the Maryland border.

And then the blows fell: ‘Pickett led his men where no men could go, and they almost made it …’ ‘Lee almost made it, but he’s in retreat …’ ‘Lee says we can hang on, but any chance of invading the North is lost …’ ‘In the Shenandoah they are burning …’ ‘Major Mark Steed died a hero’s death …’

Paul continued to frequent the widow’s walk. He would stand at the railing and survey his domain, thousands of acres beyond the range of vision. But most of the slaves were gone; Susan was gone; Mark would not be back; the railroad was still unbuilt.

During the first cold days of November 1864 Lafe Turlock sat in his cabin near the marsh and heard the geese conversing. ‘I’m gonna get me so many of them geese,’ he promised his great-grandsons, ‘that you gonna have grease all over yore face.’

He was eighty-one years old and as thin as the upper trunk of a loblolly. His old passions were gone: he had no dogs; he no longer went out at night to watch fires as they consumed houses; he fished little and had nothing to do with tonging oysters. But when the geese came back each autumn, his juices flowed, and he oiled his guns.

With most of the good hunters absent on Virginia battlefields, the goose population had risen from the normal eight hundred thousand to nearly a million, but it was still as difficult as ever to lure a particular flight over the spot where you were hiding. He told the boys who clustered about him in goose season, ‘The old ones tell the young, and you ain’t gonna ketch yorese’f a goose lessen yo’re smarter’n I think you are.’

What he would have enjoyed would be to go out with his sons, but most of them had died off, or his grandsons, but they were dying in Virginia. ‘How many you calculate we lost?’ he asked the men at the store. ‘I count nineteen Turlocks dead. Christ A’mighty, the geese is runnin’ wild.’

He was not certain he could rely on the young boys; they could barely heft their guns. Still, they could fill spots in the blinds and maybe luck something. He had them out before dawn; in goose season school was unimportant. And when the geese looked as if they might be coming in, he disciplined them sternly: ‘You cain’t hit no goose at a hundred yards. You got to lure him down.’ With ancient skill he blew upon his whistle, and the geese were tempted. They came in low, and when they were in dead-sure range he shouted at the boys, ‘Now!’

It was a bad year, but the Turlocks would eat.

THE WORST STORMS TO HIT THE CHESAPEAKE ARE
the hurricanes which generate in the southeast, over the Atlantic Ocean. There they twist and turn, building power and lifting from the waves enormous quantities of water that they carry north in turbulent clouds.

They first hit Cape Charles, at the southern end of the Eastern Shore, then explode ferociously over the waters of the bay, driving crabbers and oystermen to shore. Their winds, often reaching a fierce ninety miles an hour, whip the shallow waters of the Chesapeake into waves so violent that any small boat runs a good risk of being capsized.

In late August of 1886 such a hurricane collected its force just south of Norfolk, but instead of devastating the bay, it leapfrogged far to the north, depositing in the Susquehanna Valley an incredible fall of rain. In less than a day, nineteen inches fell on certain parts of Pennsylvania, and all things were flooded, even into New York State. Harrisburg felt the lash as its waterfront homes were submerged; Sunbury was inundated; poor Wilkes-Barre watched the dark waters engulf its jetties; and even Towanda, far to the north, was swamped by raging floods from streams that a day earlier had been mere trickles.

From a thousand such rivulets the great flood accumulated, and as it crested on its way south to the Chesapeake, it buried small towns and endangered large cities. On it came, a devastating onslaught of angry water, twisting and probing into every depression. Past Harrisburg it swept, and Columbia, and over small villages near the border of Pennsylvania. Finally, in northern Maryland, it exploded with destructive fury into the body of the Chesapeake, raising the headwaters of that considerable bay four and five feet.

For three days the storm continued, producing strange and arbitrary
results. Norfolk was by-passed completely: merely a heavy rain. Crisfield had no problems: a slow rain of no significance. Devon Island and Patamoke were barely touched: their biggest problem was that they had no sun during three days. But the great bay itself was nearly destroyed: it came close to being drowned by the floods cascading down from the north. It lay strangling in its own water.

To understand what was happening, one must visualize the bay as carefully structured in three distinct dimensions. From north to south the waters of the bay were meticulously graduated according to their salt content, and any alteration of this salinity was fraught with peril. At Havre de Grace, where the Susquehanna debouched into the bay, there should have been in autumn three parts of salt per thousand; there was none. On the oyster beds near Devon Island there ought to have been fifteen parts per thousand to keep the shellfish healthy; there were two. And at the crabbing beds farther south the crustaceans were accustomed to nineteen parts; they had to contend with less than six. All living things in the bay were imperiled, for the great flood had altered the bases of their existence. The protection provided by salt water was being denied them, and if relief did not come quickly, millions upon millions of bay creatures were going to die.

Prompt restoration of the traditional north-south relationship was essential, but the bay was also divided into a bottom and a top. The lowest area contained deep, cold, very salt water, often deficient in oxygen, moving in from the Atlantic Ocean, bringing many life-sustaining components. Deep down, it tended to move in a northerly direction, and its presence was essential for the health of the bay. On top rested the less salt, less heavy, warmer water replenished by the sun and containing a good oxygen content. It tended to move in a southward direction, sliding along on the top of the cold water. It carried with it many of the lesser forms of marine life on which the crabs and fish lived, and it deposited the nutrients which the oysters lower down required.

But these two vast layers of water should not be considered unrelated, like sheets of mutually exclusive steel moving in opposite directions, each independent of the other. Convection currents, generated by the sun, could at any given point draw the cold layer up and force the warm layer down. A strong surface wind might encourage such an interchange; the passing churning propeller of a large ship could augment the normal pressures that from below and above were constantly working on the two layers, causing them to mix.

But in general the water down deep was colder and saltier and slower; the water near the surface was warmer and less salty and more filled with oxygen. There was another difference: the water on the surface moved freely, even capriciously, over the entire surface of the bay; but the deep water held close to the invisible channel cut some hundred thousand
years ago by the prehistoric Susquehanna as it drained away the waters of the first ice age. At the bottom of the Chesapeake, running its entire length and reaching well out into the Atlantic, this primeval riverbed existed, sixty feet deeper than the shallow waters surrounding it, but as clearly defined as when first reamed out by tumbling boulders.