The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
“Got lots mo’ in dem boxes nailed up dar – yessah, hit’s no use er lettin’ good tings go by yer when you kin des put out yer han’ en stop ’em! Some er de members ordered horses en carriages, but I tuk er par er fine mules wid harness en two buggies an er wagin. Dey ’roun at de libry stable, sah.”
The doctor thanked Aleck for his friendly feeling, but told him it was, of course, impossible for him at this time, being only a taxpayer and neither a voter nor a member of the Legislature, to share in his supply of “sundries.”
He went to the warehouse that night with his friend to hear Lynch, wondering if his mind were capable of receiving another shock.
This meeting had been called to indorse the candidacy, for Justice of the Supreme Court, of Napoleon Whipper, the Leader of the House, the notorious negro thief and gambler, and of William Pitt Moses, an ex-convict, his confederate in crime. They had been unanimously chosen for the positions by a secret caucus of the ninety-four negro members of the House. This addition to the Court, with the negro already a member, would give a majority to the black man on the last Tribunal of Appeal.
The few white men of the party who had any sense of decency were in open revolt at this atrocity. But their influence was on the wane. The carpet-bagger shaped the first Convention and got the first plums of office. Now the negro was in the saddle, and he meant to stay. There were not enough white men in the Legislature to force a roll-call on a division of the House. This meeting was an open defiance of all pale-faces inside or outside party lines.
Every inch of space in the big cotton warehouse was jammed – a black living cloud, pungent and piercing.
The distinguished Lieutenant-Governor, Silas Lynch, had not yet arrived, but the negro Justice of the Supreme Court, Pinchback, was in his seat as the presiding officer.
Dr. Cameron watched the movements of the black judge, already notorious for the sale of his opinions, with a sense of sickening horror. This man was but yesterday a slave, his father a medicine man in an African jungle who decided the guilt or innocence of the accused by the test of administering poison. If the poison killed the man, he was guilty; if he survived, he was innocent. For four thousand years his land had stood a solid bulwark of unbroken barbarism. Out of its darkness he had been thrust upon the seat of judgment of the laws of the proudest and highest type of man evolved in time. It seemed a hideous dream.
His thoughts were interrupted by a shout. It came spontaneous and tremendous in its genuine feeling. The magnificent figure of Lynch, their idol, appeared walking down the aisle escorted by the little scallawag who was the Governor.
He took his seat on the platform with the easy assurance of conscious power. His broad shoulders, superb head, and gleaming jungle eyes held every man in the audience before he had spoken a word.
In the first masterful tones of his voice the doctor’s keen intelligence caught the ring of his savage metal and felt the shock of his powerful personality – a personality which had thrown to the winds every mask, whose sole aim of life was sensual, whose only fears were of physical pain and death, who could worship a snake and sacrifice a human being.
His playful introduction showed him a child of Mystery, moved by Voices and inspired by a Fetish. His face was full of good humour, and his whole figure rippled with sleek animal vivacity. For the moment, life was a comedy and a masquerade teeming with whims, fancies, ecstasies and superstitions.
He held the surging crowd in the hollow of his hand. They yelled, laughed, howled, or wept as he willed.
Now he painted in burning words the imaginary horrors of slavery until the tears rolled down his cheeks and he wept at the sound of his own voice. Every dusky hearer burst into tears and moans.
He stopped, suddenly brushed the tears from his eyes, sprang to the edge of the platform, threw both arms above his head and shouted:
“Hosannah to the Lord God Almighty for Emancipation!”
Instantly five thousand negroes, as one man, were on their feet, shouting and screaming. Their shouts rose in unison, swelled into a thunder peal, and died away as one voice.
Dead silence followed, and every eye was again riveted on Lynch. For two hours the doctor sat transfixed, listening and watching him sway the vast audience with hypnotic power.
There was not one note of hesitation or of doubt. It was the challenge of race against race to mortal combat. His closing words again swept every negro from his seat and melted every voice into a single frenzied shout:
“Within five years,” he cried, “the intelligence and the wealth of this mighty State will be transferred to the negro race. Lift up your heads. The world is yours. Take it. Here and now I serve notice on every white man who breathes that I am as good as he is. I demand, and I am going to have, the privilege of going to see him in his house or his hotel, eating with him and sleeping with him, and when I see fit, to take his daughter in marriage!”
As the doctor emerged from the stifling crowd with his friend, he drew a deep breath of fresh air, took from his pocket his conservative memorial, picked it into little bits, and scattered them along the street as he walked in silence back to his hotel.
CHAPTER IX
At Lover’s Leap
In spite of the pitiful collapse of old Stoneman under his stroke of paralysis, his children still saw the unconquered soul shining in his colourless eyes. They had both been on the point of confessing their love affairs to him and joining in the inevitable struggle when he was stricken. They knew only too well that he would not consent to a dual alliance with the Camerons under the conditions of fierce hatreds and violence into which the State had drifted. They were too high-minded to consider a violation of his wishes while thus helpless, with his strange eyes following them about in childlike eagerness. His weakness was mightier than his iron will.
So, for eighteen months, while he slowly groped out of mental twilight, each had waited – Elsie with a tender faith struggling with despair, and Phil in a torture of uncertainty and fear.
In the meantime, the young Northerner had become as radical in his sympathies with the Southern people as his father had ever been against them. This power of assimilation has always been a mark of Southern genius. The sight of the Black Hand on their throats now roused his righteous indignation. The patience with which they endured was to him amazing. The Southerner he had found to be the last man on earth to become a revolutionist. All his traits were against it. His genius for command, the deep sense of duty and honour, his hospitality, his deathless love of home, his supreme constancy and sense of civic unity, all combined to make him ultraconservative. He began now to see that it was reverence for authority as expressed in the Constitution under which slavery was established which made Secession inevitable.
Besides, the laziness and incapacity of the negro had been more than he could endure. With no ties of tradition or habits of life to bind him, he simply refused to tolerate them. In this feeling Elsie had grown early to sympathize. She discharged Aunt Cindy for feeding her children from the kitchen, and brought a cook and house girl from the North, while Phil would employ only white men in any capacity.
In the desolation of negro rule the Cameron farm had become worthless. The taxes had more than absorbed the income, and the place was only kept from execution by the indomitable energy of Mrs. Cameron, who made the hotel pay enough to carry the interest on a mortgage which was increasing from season to season.
The doctor’s practice was with him a divine calling. He never sent bills to his patients. They paid something if they had it. Now they had nothing.
Ben’s law practice was large for his age and experience, but his clients had no money.
While the Camerons were growing each day poorer, Phil was becoming rich. His genius, skill, and enterprise had been quick to see the possibilities of the waterpower. The old Eagle cotton mills had been burned during the war. Phil organized the Eagle & Phœnix Company, interested Northern capitalists, bought the falls, and erected two great mills, the dim hum of whose spindles added a new note to the river’s music. Eager, swift, modest, his head full of ideas, his heart full of faith, he had pressed forward to success.
As the old Commoner’s mind began to clear, and his recovery was sure, Phil determined to press his suit for Margaret’s hand to an issue.
Ben had dropped a hint of an interview of the Rev. Hugh McAlpin with Dr. Cameron, which had thrown Phil into a cold sweat.
He hurried to the hotel to ask Margaret to drive with him that afternoon. He would stop at Lover’s Leap and settle the question.
He met the preacher, just emerging from the door, calm, handsome, serious, and Margaret by his side. The dark-haired beauty seemed strangely serene. What could it mean? His heart was in his throat. Was he too late? Wreathed in smiles when the preacher had gone, the girl’s face was a riddle he could not solve.
To his joy, she consented to go.
As he left in his trim little buggy for the hotel, he stooped and kissed Elsie, whispering:
“Make an offering on the altar of love for me, Sis!”
“You’re too slow. The prayers of all the saints will not save you!” she replied with a laugh, throwing him a kiss as he disappeared in the dust.
As they drove through the great forest on the cliffs overlooking the river, the Southern world seemed lit with new splendours to-day for the Northerner. His heart beat with a strange courage. The odour of the pines, their sighing music, the subtone of the falls below, the subtle life-giving perfume of the fullness of summer, the splendour of the sun gleaming through the deep foliage, and the sweet sensuous air, all seemed incarnate in the calm, lovely face and gracious figure beside him.
They took their seat on the old rustic built against the beech, which was the last tree on the brink of the cliff. A hundred feet below flowed the river, rippling softly along a narrow strip of sand which its current had thrown against the rocks. The ledge of towering granite formed a cave eighty feet in depth at the water’s edge. From this projecting wall, tradition said a young Indian princess once leaped with her lover, fleeing from the wrath of a cruel father who had separated them. The cave below was inaccessible from above, being reached by a narrow footpath along the river’s edge when entered a mile downstream.
The view from the seat, under the beech, was one of marvellous beauty. For miles the broad river rolled in calm, shining glory seaward, its banks fringed with cane and trees, while fields of corn and cotton spread in waving green toward the distant hills and blue mountains of the west.
Every tree on this cliff was cut with the initials of generations of lovers from Piedmont.
They sat in silence for awhile, Margaret idly playing with a flower she had picked by the pathway, and Phil watching her devoutly. The Southern sun had tinged her face the reddish warm hue of ripened fruit, doubly radiant by contrast with her wealth of dark-brown hair. The lustrous glance of her eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, and the graceful, careless pose of her stately figure held him enraptured. Her dress of airy, azure blue, so becoming to her dark beauty, gave Phil the impression of eiderdown feathers of some rare bird of the tropics. He felt that if he dared to touch her she might lift her wings and sail over the cliff into the sky and forget to light again at his side.
“I am going to ask a very bold and impertinent question, Miss Margaret,” Phil said with resolution. “May I?”
Margaret smiled incredulously.
“I’ll risk your impertinence, and decide as to its boldness.”
“Tell me, please, what that preacher said to you to-day.”
Margaret looked away, unable to suppress the merriment that played about her eyes and mouth.
“Will you never breathe it to a soul if I do?”
“Never.”
“Honest Injun, here on the sacred altar of the princess?”
“On my honour.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” she said, biting her lips to keep back a laugh. “Mr. McAlpin is very handsome and eloquent. I have always thought him the best preacher we have ever had in Piedmont – ”
“Yes, I know,” Phil interrupted with a frown. “He is very pious,” she went on evenly, “and seeks Divine guidance in prayer in everything he does. He called this morning to see me, and I was playing for him in the little music-room off the parlour, when he suddenly closed the door and said:
“‘Miss Margaret, I am going to take, this morning, the most important step of my life – ’
“Of course I hadn’t the remotest idea what he meant —
“‘Will you join me in a word of prayer?’ he asked, and knelt right down. I was accustomed, of course, to kneel with him in family worship at his pastoral calls, and so from habit I slipped to one knee by the piano stool, wondering what on earth he was about. When he prayed with fervour for the Lord to bless the great love with which he hoped to hallow my life – I giggled. It broke up the meeting. He rose and asked me to marry him. I told him the Lord hadn’t revealed it to me – ”
Phil seized her hand and held it firmly. The smile died from the girl’s face, her hand trembled, and the rose tint on her cheeks flamed to scarlet.
“Margaret, my own, I love you,” he cried with joy. “You could have told that story only to the one man whom you love – is it not true?”
“Yes. I’ve loved you always,” said the low, sweet voice.
“Always?” asked Phil through a tear.
“Before I saw you, when they told me you were as Ben’s twin brother, my heart began to sing at the sound of your name – ”
“Call it,” he whispered.
“Phil, my sweetheart!” she said with a laugh.
“How tender and homelike the music of your voice! The world has never seen the match of your gracious Southern womanhood! Snowbound in the North, I dreamed, as a child, of this world of eternal sunshine. And now every memory and dream I’ve found in you.”
“And you won’t be disappointed in my simple ideal that finds its all within a home?”
“No. I love the old-fashioned dream of the South. Maybe you have enchanted me, but I love these green hills and mountains, these rivers musical with cascade and fall, these solemn forests – but for the Black Curse, the South would be to-day the garden of the world!”
“And you will help our people lift this curse?” softly asked the girl, nestling closer to his side.
“Yes, dearest, thy people shall be mine! Had I a thousand wrongs to cherish, I’d forgive them all for your sake. I’ll help you build here a new South on all that’s good and noble in the old, until its dead fields blossom again, its harbours bristle with ships, and the hum of a thousand industries make music in every valley. I’d sing to you in burning verse if I could, but it is not my way. I have been awkward and slow in love, perhaps – but I’ll be swift in your service. I dream to make dead stones and wood live and breathe for you, of victories wrung from Nature that are yours. My poems will be deeds, my flowers the hard-earned wealth that has a soul, which I shall lay at your feet.”
“Who said my lover was dumb?” she sighed, with a twinkle in her shining eyes. “You must introduce me to your father soon. He must like me as my father does you, or our dream can never come true.”
A pain gripped Phil’s heart, but he answered bravely:
“I will. He can’t help loving you.”
They stood on the rustic seat to carve their initials within a circle, high on the old beechwood book of love.
“May I write it out in full – Margaret Cameron – Philip Stoneman?” he asked.
“No – only the initials now – the full names when you’ve seen my father and I’ve seen yours. Jeannie Campbell and Henry Lenoir were once written thus in full, and many a lover has looked at that circle and prayed for happiness like theirs. You can see there a new one cut over the old, the bark has filled, and written on the fresh page is ‘Marion Lenoir’ with the blank below for her lover’s name.”
Phil looked at the freshly cut circle and laughed:
“I wonder if Marion or her mother did that?”
“Her mother, of course.”
“I wonder whose will be the lucky name some day within it?” said Phil musingly as he finished his own.
CHAPTER X
A Night Hawk
When the old Commoner’s private physician had gone and his mind had fully cleared, he would sit for hours in the sunshine of the vine-clad porch, asking Elsie of the village, its life, and its people. He smiled good-naturedly at her eager sympathy for their sufferings as at the enthusiasm of a child who could not understand. He had come possessed by a great idea – events must submit to it. Her assurance that the poverty and losses of the people were far in excess of the worst they had known during the war was too absurd even to secure his attention.
He had refused to know any of the people, ignoring the existence of Elsie’s callers. But he had fallen in love with Marion from the moment he had seen her. The cold eye of the old fox hunter kindled with the fire of his forgotten youth at the sight of this beautiful girl seated on the glistening back of the mare she had saved from death.
As she rode through the village every boy lifted his hat as to passing royalty, and no one, old or young, could allow her to pass without a cry of admiration. Her exquisite figure had developed into the full tropic splendour of Southern girlhood.
She had rejected three proposals from ardent lovers, on one of whom her mother had quite set her heart. A great fear had grown in Mrs. Lenoir’s mind lest she were in love with Ben Cameron. She slipped her arm around her one day and timidly asked her.
A faint flush tinged Marion’s face up to the roots of her delicate blonde hair, and she answered with a quick laugh:
“Mamma, how silly you are! You know I’ve always been in love with Ben – since I can first remember. I know he is in love with Elsie Stoneman. I am too young, the world too beautiful, and life too sweet to grieve over my first baby love. I expect to dance with him at his wedding, then meet my fate and build my own nest.”
Old Stoneman begged that she come every day to see him. He never tired praising her to Elsie. As she walked gracefully up to the house one afternoon, holding Hugh by the hand, he said to Elsie:
“Next to you, my dear, she is the most charming creature I ever saw. Her tenderness for everything that needs help touches the heart of an old lame man in a very soft spot.”
“I’ve never seen any one who could resist her,” Elsie answered. “Her gloves may be worn, her feet clad in old shoes, yet she is always neat, graceful, dainty, and serene. No wonder her mother worships her.”
Sam Ross, her simple friend, had stopped at the gate, and looked over into the lawn as if afraid to come in.
When Marion saw Sam, she turned back to the gate to invite him in. The keeper of the poor, a vicious-looking negro, suddenly confronted him, and he shrank in terror close to the girl’s side.
“What you doin’ here, sah?” the black keeper railed. “Ain’t I done tole you ’bout runnin’ away?”
“You let him alone,” Marion cried.
The negro pushed her roughly from his side and knocked Sam down. The girl screamed for help, and old Stoneman hobbled down the steps, following Elsie.
When they reached the gate, Marion was bending over the prostrate form.
“Oh, my, my, I believe he’s killed him!” she wailed.
“Run for the doctor, sonny, quick,” Stoneman said to Hugh. The boy darted away and brought Dr. Cameron.
“How dare you strike that man, you devil?” thundered the old statesman.
“’Case I tole ’im ter stay home en do de wuk I put ’im at, en he all de time runnin’ off here ter git somfin’ ter eat. I gwine frail de life outen ’im, ef he doan min’ me.”
“Well, you make tracks back to the Poorhouse. I’ll attend to this man, and I’ll have you arrested for this before night,” said Stoneman, with a scowl.
The black keeper laughed as he left.
“Not ’less you’se er bigger man dan Gubner Silas Lynch, you won’t!”
When Dr. Cameron had restored Sam, and dressed the wound on his head where he had struck a stone in falling, Stoneman insisted that the boy be put to bed.
Turning to Dr. Cameron, he asked:
“Why should they put a brute like this in charge of the poor?”
“That’s a large question, sir, at this time,” said the doctor politely, “and now that you have asked it, I have some things I’ve been longing for an opportunity to say to you.”
“Be seated, sir,” the old Commoner answered, “I shall be glad to hear them.”
Elsie’s heart leaped with joy over the possible outcome of this appeal, and she left the room with a smile for the doctor.
“First, allow me,” said the Southerner pleasantly, “to express my sorrow at your long illness, and my pleasure at seeing you so well. Your children have won the love of all our people and have had our deepest sympathy in your illness.”
Stoneman muttered an inaudible reply, and the doctor went on:
“Your question brings up, at once, the problem of the misery and degradation into which our country has sunk under negro rule – ”
Stoneman smiled coldly and interrupted:
“Of course, you understand my position in politics, Doctor Cameron – I am a Radical Republican.”
“So much the better,” was the response. “I have been longing for months to get your ear. Your word will be all the more powerful if raised in our behalf. The negro is the master of our State, county, city, and town governments. Every school, college, hospital, asylum, and poorhouse is his prey. What you have seen is but a sample. Negro insolence grows beyond endurance. Their women are taught to insult their old mistresses and mock their poverty as they pass in their old, faded dresses. Yesterday a black driver struck a white child of six with his whip, and when the mother protested, she was arrested by a negro policeman, taken before a negro magistrate, and fined $10 for ‘insulting a freedman.’”
Stoneman frowned: “Such things must be very exceptional.”
“They are everyday occurrences and cease to excite comment. Lynch, the Lieutenant-Governor, who has bought a summer home here, is urging this campaign of insult with deliberate purpose – ”
The old man shook his head. “I can’t think the Lieutenant-Governor guilty of such petty villainy.”
“Our school commissioner,” the doctor continued, “is a negro who can neither read nor write. The black grand jury last week discharged a negro for stealing cattle and indicted the owner for false imprisonment. No such rate of taxation was ever imposed on a civilized people. A tithe of it cost Great Britain her colonies. There are 5,000 homes in this county – 2,900 of them are advertised for sale by the sheriff to meet his tax bills. This house will be sold next court day – ”
Stoneman looked up sharply. “Sold for taxes?”
“Yes; with the farm which has always been Mrs. Lenoir’s support. In part her loss came from the cotton tax. Congress, in addition to the desolation of war, and the ruin of black rule, has wrung from the cotton farmers of the South a tax of $67,000,000. Every dollar of this money bears the stain of the blood of starving people. They are ready to give up, or to spring some desperate scheme of resistance – ”
The old man lifted his massive head and his great jaws came together with a snap:
“Resistance to the authority of the National Government?”
“No; resistance to the travesty of government and the mockery of civilization under which we are being throttled! The bayonet is now in the hands of a brutal negro militia. The tyranny of military martinets was child’s play to this. As I answered your call this morning I was stopped and turned back in the street by the drill of a company of negroes under the command of a vicious scoundrel named Gus who was my former slave. He is the captain of this company. Eighty thousand armed negro troops, answerable to no authority save the savage instincts of their officers, terrorize the State. Every white company has been disarmed and disbanded by our scallawag Governor. I tell you, sir, we are walking on the crust of a volcano – ”
