The Furies (17 page)

May the 14th.
The debate continues, heated and unsettling. I absented myself for a time this afternoon, having realized that I will be forced to take a stand unless the committees laboring in private can effect a compromise, which I think unlikely. By leaving the gathering, I hoped to free my mind of the dismaying subject—only to discover it turning to another almost as troublesome.

My thoughts returned to my conversion six years ago by the Reverend Lee of the Willamette Mission in Oregon. Jason Lee was the great man who first revealed to me that my name, Jepthah as it is spelled in the Old Testament, means “God opens.” The conversion did not please my father, to whom I have not written in far too long.

Many years ago, my father Jared Kent put the eastern part of the continent behind him forever, accepting both the freedom which the western lands afford, and the struggle they require for even meager success. My father came to love the free spaces, their natural beauties and abundance. He wanted me to remain a westerner as he is. I could never convince him that my given name must have had a preordained significance unknown to him when he bestowed it, for, through the Reverend Lee, God truly did open my soul to His message, and I felt a compelling call to train myself for the ministry. My answering of the call wounded my father not a little.

As I walked along the Broad Way, I was overcome with pity for my father, who saw me onto the ship for the east with the greatest reluctance. His rheumatism, developed from many years spent in icy streams trapping for plews, has made his existence as a wheat farmer trying in the extreme. His sorrow was increased when my beloved mother, Grass Singing, went to her grave three years ago. Thinking of him alone now in Oregon, my guilt was, for a time, nigh unbearable.

Desperate to relieve it, I sought refuge in an act I freely acknowledge as a pandering to human vanity. In answer to my wife’s earnest request, I inquired about, and was directed to, a studio where the remarkable Daguerreotype is available.

The sitting required less time than I expected—a minute, no more. But all of the kitchen funds which my dear Fan gave me for this express purpose were required to purchase the little copper plate which now reposes in a silk-lined box on my bureau.

Although the visit to the studio was worldly indulgence, the experience refreshed my spirit in an unexpected way. On the plate I first saw not myself but the Almighty’s handiwork—for surely the Frenchman, Daguerre, was blessed by heavenly inspiration when he perfected his method of capturing the human face on a bit of metal.

On returning to my hotel, I continued to marvel at the plate, which is somehow treated with silver salts and then exposed to the light to create an image. I discovered again why my brethren chide me good-naturedly with the name “Indian Preacher.” I have the light eyes of the Kents but the dark and unruly hair of the Shoshoni. All in all, mine is a curious and severe countenance. For a few moments, I fancied that, in the eyes of the image, I saw my guilt over the unhappiness I had brought to my father, and I fancied that I also saw my doubt about where I would stand on the question now being debated at the Conference in increasingly heated language.

May the 25th.
All the city agog with news from Baltimore, where, only yesterday, there was received an actual, audible message transmitted in code from the Supreme Court room in the capital by means of the electric telegraph of Mr. Morse. He is the inventor of the device as well as the code. Four words were sent: “What hath God wrought?”

As the debate grinds on, I ask the same racking question about the presence of the black man in America. Why was this tribulation visited upon him—and upon us? Why were we so unlucky, or so foolish, as to find this form of labor most suitable to the requirements of an economy founded on tobacco, rice, cane and cotton crops?

Is Garrison correct in his jeremiads? Is our precious Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because it recognizes the right of an owner to apprehend Negroes who have committed the felonious act of fleeing from their servitude? As Garrison claims, does the Constitution at the same time guarantee Negroes every right of citizenship that whites enjoy? Even many in the northern states find that concept too radical—yet the extreme abolitionists have been propounding it for more than a decade.

Decent people disagree on both questions just noted. Mr. Justice Story of Connecticut, for example, expressed a majority opinion of the Supreme Court when the Pennsylvania Act of ’26 was struck down two years ago. The opinion was founded on the Court’s contention that neither Pennsylvania nor any other individual state has the authority to prevent the owner of an escaped Negro from reclaiming him—even if the Negro has reached nonslave soil. Mr. Story clearly believed that the owning of slaves confers an unquestionable Constitutional right to recapture that slave—that piece of property.

In further opposition to Garrison and his followers, the opinion also implied that our American liberties are solely for the benefit of members of the white race. Story and the Court ignored the Constitutional promise of due process. Conclusion—it simply does not apply to any man or woman with dark skin.

Who is wrong and who is right? I do not know; I do not know!

Missouri excepted—but made permissible south of that line, while Maine was admitted as a free state to balance Missouri’s presence.

They say former president Jefferson, a very old man in those days and but five years from his death, spoke of the Compromise as “a fire bell in the night,” warning of a sectional dispute that could rend the nation. I fear he was correct. The abolitionists want the institution of slavery destroyed wherever it exists, and forbidden forevermore.

My wife’s people, of course, believe Texas should and will come in slave. So no matter how the issue of admission is decided, the outcome will only provoke more bad feelings—nationally, and in whatever is left of the Methodist Episcopal Church after the Andrew question is resolved. My southern brethren and I now recognize that if the Andrew matter is put to a vote, we will be outnumbered and defeated—

A sorrowful conceit, the inscription of “we”—I am still tormented, uncertain—but tending toward the other side.

May the 30th.
Perused the book stalls this afternoon. The Conference is recessed while the committees labor, in hopes that some compromise may yet be worked out. Discovered the bins are a-bulge with guidebooks purporting to inform those afflicted with “the Oregon fever” as to the best way to equip themselves for the journey across the mountains.

In the past few years the “fever” has become epidemic. The trains of wagons leaving Missouri in the good weather number in the dozens, so the newspapers say. I would as soon never meet one of those eager pilgrims, for I would be forced to report the truth: that homesteading in the Oregon valleys is fraught with risk.

For one thing, the border dispute with Great Britain remains an irritant and a potential source of conflict. Everyone cries, “Fifty-four forty or fight!” But informed opinion maintains that England will never accept the fifty-fourth degree of latitude as Oregon’s northern boundary. For another, homesteading is best left to

May the 27th.
There is no way in which I can evade the issue before the Conference, so I have given up trying. I am, instead, struggling to reach my own decision.

After digesting the various arguments and praying on the whole matter, I am for the moment tending to side with the faction which would unseat Bishop Andrew, even though the bishop is clearly a man without onus; a Christian man; a Methodist man; a good man. If my present mood prevails, I will in effect turn my back on my own dear wife and her family.

Am I capable? And is it
right?

Later.
Mr. Polk and Mr. Dallas have been nominated as presidential candidates by the Democrats in Baltimore—the news “telegraphed” for the first time in the nation’s history. Either Polk or Mr. Clay, the candidate of the Whigs, will be forced to resolve the stormy issue of annexation of Texas. Mr. Clay is in opposition because the Texan Republic has not been recognized by Mexico, and there is talk afloat that annexation will mean war.

Of more pertinence, if Texas should be admitted to the Union, it will come in as a slave state, further promoting sectional strife. It is already known that a treaty of annexation prepared by Secretary of State Calhoun and currently before the Senate will be rebuffed. But opposition to annexation does not end there. The politicians who espouse Garrison’s radical philosophy are adamantly against the extension of slavery into any new territory whatsoever—a thorny problem since the country’s mood is generally expansionist, among some sectors of the population—the restless and the poor, whose universal answer to unhappiness or failure is westward migration—wildly so.

The northern radicals will never be content merely with blocking the admission of new slave territories, however. They would prefer to completely upset the fragile balance of the “spheres of interest” established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, by means of which slavery was prohibited in all Louisiana Purchase lands north of approximately the thirty-sixth parallel—those thoroughly skilled in agriculture. This I have seen for myself.

My father traveled to Oregon with my mother and me after the summer fur rendezvous of ’37. At that time, the price of a plew was already down to the disastrous low of one dollar, due to beaver hats at last passing from fashion. My father and his fellow trappers saw the demise of their trade in that depressed price—but my father, unlike some too old or too disheartened to begin again, was determined to find an alternate livelihood.

Although he has worked diligently at wheat farming in Oregon, my father has not fared well, lacking the proper experience—and the temperament; he was always more suited to the boisterous, unfettered life of the brigades with which he marched and rode for some twenty years.

Yet I can understand why the Oregon territory holds such allure today. The vale of the Willamette is truly beautiful, and this I know my father appreciates, despite the rigors of the labor and his scant success. If he sorrows at what many would call a life of small accomplishment, it is a gentle sorrow, rendered less stinging by what God has shown him of the lovely, though demanding land beyond the Mississippi. “I have looked on wonders,” he remarked once, “and while I live I hope I never lose the hunger to behold more.”

If my father regrets anything deeply, I suspect it is the stormy temper which plagued him during his early years. I can never forget his quiet confession about taking the life of a man named Walpole, a man involved in a scheme to seize control of the Boston printing firm my great-grandfather Kent founded. My father set fire to the firm to leave the schemers nothing but ashes, then fled the city of Boston with his young female cousin.

The confession took place one night when I was thirteen or fourteen, my father saying I was at last old enough to hear the story. I can still see him reclining in our tepee that evening while my mother sewed him a new hide shirt.

I see his sun-lightened yellow hair streaking to gray, and his thick-knuckled fingers, stiff from the cold beaver streams, turning and turning his one tangible reminder of his younger days—a fob medallion struck for him by his father’s half brother, Gilbert Kent, who operated the firm for a time. The medal bore the family symbol, and a Latin motto—
Cape locum et fac vestigium.
Take a stand and make a mark.

The former my father felt he had done. He had put the past behind him forever, and ventured into the far west, both to make a new life and to search—fruitlessly as it turned out—for his cousin, Gilbert’s orphaned daughter, whom he lost to an abductor in Tennessee in 1814. As to the latter—making a mark—my father openly doubted his success.

Because my father speaks of the past as closed—an indication, perhaps, that its memory still holds a power to hurt him—I have felt it kinder never to write him about my two visits to Boston while I was studying at the Institute. I not only saw the house on fashionable Beacon Street where my father lived—a house now occupied by an unknown family—but I also saw, rebuilt, a publishing company called Kent and Son.

What called all this to mind is a volume I discovered among the guidebooks in the stalls—an expensive and obviously new edition of a currently popular historical romance by the Frenchman, Dumas. The book is entitled
The Three Musketeers.
The spine was damaged, no doubt accounting for the volume’s presence in the bin.

I opened the book, smitten by a most ungodly urge to read something other than Holy Scripture. There on the title page was the family device which my father carried on the obverse of his medal—the partially filled bottle of tea. Accompanying the symbol were the words
Kent and Son.
I located the date of publication. 1844. The firm still survives.

Before I replaced the novel, I briefly entertained the idea of sending it to my father with my next, long overdue letter. I decided against it for the same reason I said nothing about my discoveries in Boston. To hide the truth from a man who prized his family heritage and saw it lost, remains, I believe, the most Christian and compassionate course.

Later.
Did I do right about the book? I am so unsure of everything, though I try to let no one see. Only these private pages, an outlet for my turmoil now and for my hopes and apprehensions during the past two years, know of my misgivings—only these pages, and Him Who Sees All.

May He have mercy on my weakness and my doubt.

June the 1st.
All compromise has failed. The will of the Conference majority has proved paramount. A substitute resolution, requesting Bishop Andrew to cease his ecclesiastical function, was adopted one hundred ten to sixty-eight. Having spent a sleepless night in which I prayed almost continuously, and recognizing that I may have committed a grave sin, I abandoned my earlier flirtation with the majority and cast my vote nay.