Shadow of Power (40 page)

“I don’t remember how it started, whether it was a joke or if we were serious. But that’s when we decided,” she says. “It was right there, that day on the phone. We knew that it wouldn’t be easy. We convinced ourselves that all we were doing was buying some time. I flew down to Curaçao the next day. We had the body cremated. Being on the islands turned out to be an advantage. Arthur and his wife had never been to Curaçao before. She had rented the house because their own place on St. Croix was being repaired. Nobody on Curaçao knew who he was. I won’t tell you how we did it, but we were able to secure a death certificate with the date left open.

“I think we knew from the beginning that we couldn’t make it all the way through to the next election. That was seventeen months away. We talked all night. Aranda, the clerk, was getting scared. I think he thought we were out of our minds. He was right. But that was the thing about Arthur—once you knew him, you couldn’t help but fall under his spell, and Aranda was already there. He just needed a little convincing. We found a calendar and started looking at it. The more we looked, the more we realized we only had to keep the secret for nine months, from October until the following June—a single term. As we sat there in the islands, the Court was in recess. They wouldn’t start their next term until October. If we could keep the world at bay from then until the following June, the Court would start its next summer recess. Any correspondence coming in would be easy. Margaret had signed Arthur’s name on checks and other documents for years. We were far enough away that we didn’t have to worry about visitors dropping in. The problem was the phone.

“Still, the longer we looked at the calendar, the more plausible it sounded. The media back home was already fixated on the presidential
primaries. Members of the House and Senate were in election mode. By the following June, with a presidential election five months away and the Court in recess, nobody would be looking for Arthur or wondering where he was. By the time the Court reconvened, the election would be a month away. No sitting president was going to nominate a candidate to the Supreme Court and secure Senate confirmation when he’s a lame duck and the election to replace him is a month out. Not in the climate of today’s politics.” As she says this, her eyes seem to sparkle. Trisha Scott is a true believer.

“You had it all worked out.”

“I know that looking back at it, you must think we were crazy, except for one thing. We had a trump card. Without it we would never have given the idea a second thought. We told ourselves that anytime things got too hot, we could simply fill in the date on the death certificate, call the Court to send out a press release, pack up the ashes, and fly home. Who would ever know? At least that’s what we thought.”

“That’s when Scarborough and his videotape caught up with you.”

“Yes. For six weeks everything went like clockwork. If court staff called, Aranda took care of it, supposedly shuttling answers, as the justice was too tired to talk. It even worked with two members of the Court. You’d be surprised how few phone calls you get when everybody thinks you’re sick and you need your rest.

“And then it happened. Out of the blue, from a direction I never even looked. It was the morning before Terry was scheduled to appear on Leno. He had been all over the airwaves for days. It was hard to turn on the television and not see his face. I got a call from a woman I knew. She wasn’t really a friend. I would bump into her once in a while downtown shopping or jogging out on the Mall. You might say we once ran in the same circles. She was just coming to the end of a relationship with Terry, and she was angry. Terry’s liaisons always ended the same way. At first I thought she only wanted somebody to talk to. She knew that I’d been through the same wringer two years earlier. And so we talked.

“But partway through the conversation she said, ‘You’re a friend of Arthur Ginnis, aren’t you?’ I said yes. Then she told me that Terry had some video of the justice in a restaurant. He was looking at it on the television a few days earlier when she went to his apartment to pick up the
last of her things. He didn’t turn it off, but she didn’t know what it was, only that Terry seemed to be gloating. This was something you would always recognize if you were around him regularly. Then she told me he laughed and said something weird, something she didn’t understand. He said, ‘That old man’s about to find out what it’s like to be the author of the Hitler Diaries.’” She asked if I had any idea what he meant. I told her no. By then the blood in my veins had turned to ice.

“With everything that had happened, with Arthur dead, I’d forgotten entirely about the letter. Margaret never knew about it, nor did Aranda. I hadn’t thought about Terry in months. Suddenly I realized that Terry knew the letter was a hoax and that he was getting ready to go public. What seemed so easy in the islands six weeks earlier was now a nightmare, and there was no one I could share it with.”

The reason she now unburdens herself becomes clear. Trisha Scott has been trapped in a psychic isolation cell of horrors for almost a year, without a soul to share her tortured thoughts with.

“I couldn’t go to Terry and tell him that Arthur was dead. He wouldn’t care. Terry would simply have a second scandal to take to the bank. If I did nothing and he went public with the letter and what he knew about it, every reporter in the Western Hemisphere would be looking for Arthur. He’d be at the top of every headline in the States. And then I thought if I tried to put a date on the death certificate and Arthur turned up dead just as Terry was breaking the story on the letter, you’d have to hunt with dogs to find anybody in the country who didn’t believe that Arthur Ginnis had gotten caught in a scandal and committed suicide.

“What made it worse were Margaret and Aranda. They were innocents,” she says. “They followed my lead. They knew nothing about Scarborough or the letter or how Terry had died. All they were doing was buying time, doing what they thought Arthur would want them to do. If we couldn’t use Arthur’s death certificate to bail out, they would be caught in the middle of investigations and risk possible jail time for their part in concealing Arthur’s death. I had to stop Terry. I had no choice. What would you have done?” she says. “Tell me.”

“So what you’re saying is that Arthur Ginnis had to stay alive and Terry Scarborough had to die.”

There is a long pause as she stares at me across the table. Her eyes seem like empty spheres, and she looks dazed, as if she’s just caught a glimmer of the lights outside.

“I don’t know how else to say it, how to make such an utterly insane act sound rational,” she says, “but for me there really was no other way out.”

I finish my drink, and I get up from the table. I don’t say good-bye. I don’t say a word. I just walk toward the door. Outside, the light bars are flashing on three D.C. Metropolitan Police cars. Two uniformed cops and a plainclothes detective are walking this way. Trisha Scott will have a long night of questions ahead of her, and a great many days to think about what she has done.

I
n 1772 a black slave named James Somersett escaped from his owner in London. The owner wanted to send Somersett to Jamaica to work on a sugar plantation, what was in effect a death sentence. These events forced a decision by Lord Mansfield recorded in
Somersett’s Case,
in which it was determined that “slavery” did not exist and was not recognized under English common law. Mansfield came to this conclusion despite the fact that British ships had been hauling slaves for nearly two hundred years and many of its colonies in the British Empire could not survive without them. James Somersett was set free. This and a later decision in Scotland effectively abolished slavery in the British Isles. Though the institution of slavery continued to survive in the British colonies, including North America and the West Indies, the slaving interests of Britain were on notice by 1772 that an end to this “peculiar institution” was coming.

This is the historic backdrop for the “Jefferson Letter” and the deal that it portends, which is at the heart of the action in
Shadow of Power.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, there were more than half a million African slaves in the original thirteen British colonies of North America, constituting approximately 20 percent of the total population. In the southern colonies, African slaves made up 40 percent of the total population. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, its author, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, owned
more than a hundred slaves, a number that rose to more than two hundred during the course of his life.

Benjamin Franklin also owned African slaves, though not on the same order as Jefferson. It is known that Franklin owned at least two slaves, “King” and “George,” and held them in bondage for personal services and to work at his newspaper, the
Pennsylvania Gazette.
According to all known accounts, John Adams did not own slaves at any point in his life, even during his early presidency in Washington, when slave ownership among chief executives was common.

Jefferson made numerous statements, both verbal and in writing, evidencing his opposition to and abhorrence of the institution of slavery, and more than once he vowed to free his slaves. However, during the period between the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and his death precisely fifty years later to the day, on July 4, 1826, other than a few individual cases of emancipation—two during his lifetime and five in his will—Jefferson continued to own, sell, and purchase slaves for his own personal use. There is evidence that he took pains to instruct his property managers and overseers to exercise care that his name not be associated with these transactions when they were recorded in the local press. He died bankrupt, never freeing his slaves.

The Articles of Confederation, the first organic law of the new nation following the American Revolution, were silent on the question of slavery, leaving to the individual states the option of whether to allow slavery, as well as the power to regulate and enforce it. However, with no ability to collect taxes or to enforce national laws the confederation was a failure. Within six years of its adoption, it was clear that something more was needed if the new nation was to survive.

In May 1787 delegates from twelve of the original thirteen states convened in Philadelphia; Rhode Island absented itself. The initial goal was to revise the Articles of Confederation, but this goal was rapidly abandoned. Meeting in secret sessions, the group was determined to write a new constitution. Delegates quickly coalesced around the concept of three branches for the new government—executive, legislative, and judicial—but just as quickly divided over the issue of how to apportion representation within the legislative branch. This resulted in the “Great Compromise,” by which large states would be assured of
representation based on population in the House of Representatives and small states were assured of equal representation in the Senate, where each state would have two senators regardless of population.

Bound up in all this was the question of African slavery. The principal issue was whether slaves were to be characterized as property or as persons. Northern states, which generally opposed the institution of slavery as much for its effect on economics as a cheap source of labor as for reasons of ethics, wanted the slaves to be characterized as persons. Southern states became ambivalent until they realized that if the slaves were described as persons, this could enhance southern representation in the House of Representatives. Almost all the southern states were large in terms of geography but small in population as compared to those in the North.

In the negotiations that swirled around the language of the original Constitution, the issue of a state’s populace was critical. Population would determine not only the number of representatives in Congress for each state but the number of electoral votes to be awarded to the various states in electing the president. Therefore, control over two of the three branches of government was directly determined by population, and the third branch, the judiciary, was indirectly controlled through presidential nomination.

For southern states, where 40 percent of the residents of the various states were owned by the other 60 percent, the importance of counting African slaves in the population and their characterization as such were vital. If the South was to survive, its slaves under terms of the Constitution had to be
called
persons, even though these particular individuals were to be
treated
as property. The disadvantage to the South was that state taxes paid to the federal government were also based on a state’s population. This, however, was a blow the South was willing to suffer. Yet still there was no agreement. Southern states wanted all the slaves counted as persons. Northern states objected.

Lost in the mysteries of time, because much of what occurred was done in secret, is the question of how delegates arrived at the three-fifths compromise, by which black slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Some believe that a trade-off was made by the southern states, giving to the North the so-called Northwest Ordinance, in which slavery
was banned in the Old Northwest Territory (today the states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and parts of Wisconsin). The deals on slavery were endless.

Two other issues remained to be dealt with by compromise: the question of the slave trade (whether and for how long states could continue to import slaves from Africa) and the fugitive-slave clause that allowed bounty hunters to track down escaped slaves and return them to their owners. Georgia and both Carolinas threatened to walk out of the convention if continued importation of slaves from Africa were banned under the Constitution. In a deal with these states, and to keep them in the fold of the new nation, the North agreed to extend the slave trade to the year 1808.

In addition, and in part because a fugitive-slave provision had been included in the Northwest Ordinance, allowing slave owners to recapture slaves who escaped to the Northwest Territory, a similar clause was placed in the new Constitution. This provision resulted not only in the recapture of escaped slaves but in the enslavement of hundreds and perhaps thousands of free black citizens in northern states who had been freed by their owners.

In return for the Constitution’s fugitive-slave clause, northern states received concessions from the South regarding shipping and trade. Some historians justify the northern founders in their dealings with the South, arguing that in 1787 the North viewed slavery as a dying institution. After all, how could anyone foresee that technology, in the form of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, would revitalize the economics of slavery a mere five years after the Constitution was written?

Still the question lingers. Would these men of reason and realism, merchants and lawyers, tread on the issue of slavery differently
had
they been able to foresee the future? The fundamental fact remains that they wanted a new nation. The price of holding on to the original thirteen colonies was slavery. It was a price that history records they were willing for others to pay.