The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

This house was now the Mecca of the party in power and the storm-centre of the forces destined to shape the Nation’s life. Senators, representatives, politicians of low and high degree, artists, correspondents, foreign ministers, and cabinet officers hurried to acknowledge their fealty to the uncrowned king, and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys of his house as the first lady of the land.

When Charles Sumner called, a curious thing happened. By a code agreed on between them, Lydia Brown touched an electric signal which informed the old Commoner of his appearance. Stoneman hobbled to the folding-doors and watched through the slight opening the manner in which the icy senator greeted the negress whom he was compelled to meet thus as his social equal, though she was always particular to pose as the superior of all who bowed the knee to the old man whose house she kept.

Sumner at this time was supposed to be the most powerful man in Congress. It was a harmless fiction which pleased him, and at which Stoneman loved to laugh.

The senator from Massachusetts had just made a speech in Boston expounding the “Equality of Man,” yet he could not endure personal contact with a negro. He would go secretly miles out of the way to avoid it.

Stoneman watched him slowly and daintily approach this negress and touch her jewelled hand gingerly with the tips of his classic fingers as if she were a toad. Convulsed, he scrambled back to his desk and hugged himself while he listened to the flow of Lydia’s condescending patronage in the next room.

“This world’s too good a thing to lose!” he chuckled. “I think I’ll live always.”

When Sumner left, the hour for dinner had arrived, and by special invitation two men dined with him.

On his right sat an army officer who had been dismissed from the service, a victim of the mania for gambling. His ruddy face, iron-gray hair, and jovial mien indicated that he enjoyed life in spite of troubles.

There were no clubs in Washington at this time except the regular gambling-houses, of which there were more than one hundred in full blast.

Stoneman was himself a gambler, and spent a part of almost every night at Hall & Pemberton’s Faro Palace on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place noted for its famous restaurant. It was here that he met Colonel Howle and learned to like him. He was a man of talent, cool and audacious, and a liar of such singular fluency that he quite captivated the old Commoner’s imagination.

“Upon my soul, Howle,” he declared soon after they met, “you made the mistake of your life going into the army. You’re a born politician. You’re what I call a natural liar, just as a horse is a pacer, a dog a setter. You lie without effort, with an ease and grace that excels all art. Had you gone into politics, you could easily have been Secretary of State, to say nothing of the vice-presidency. I would say President but for the fact that men of the highest genius never attain it.”

From that moment Colonel Howle had become his charmed henchman. Stoneman owned this man body and soul, not merely because he had befriended him when he was in trouble and friendless, but because the colonel recognized the power of the leader’s daring spirit and revolutionary genius.

On his left sat a negro of perhaps forty years, a man of charming features for a mulatto, who had evidently inherited the full physical characteristics of the Aryan race, while his dark yellowish eyes beneath his heavy brows glowed with the brightness of the African jungle. It was impossible to look at his superb face, with its large, finely chiselled lips and massive nose, his big neck and broad shoulders, and watch his eyes gleam beneath the projecting forehead, without seeing pictures of the primeval forest. “The head of a Cæsar and the eyes of the jungle” was the phrase coined by an artist who painted his portrait.

His hair was black and glossy and stood in dishevelled profusion on his head between a kink and a curl. He was an orator of great power, and stirred a negro audience as by magic.

Lydia Brown had called Stoneman’s attention to this man, Silas Lynch, and induced the statesman to send him to college. He had graduated with credit and had entered the Methodist ministry. In his preaching to the freedmen he had already become a marked man. No house could hold his audiences.

As he stepped briskly into the dining-room and passed the brown woman, a close observer might have seen him suddenly press her hand and caught her sly answering smile, but the old man waiting at the head of the table saw nothing.

The woman took her seat opposite Stoneman and presided over this curious group with the easy assurance of conscious power. Whatever her real position, she knew how to play the role she had chosen to assume.

No more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the history of a great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour of American life. The grim old man who looked into her sleek tawny face and followed her catlike eyes was steadily gripping the Nation by the throat. Did he aim to make this woman the arbiter of its social life, and her ethics the limit of its moral laws?

Even the white satellite who sat opposite Lynch flushed for a moment as the thought flashed through his brain.

The old cynic, who alone knew his real purpose, was in his most genial mood to-night, and the grim lines of his powerful face relaxed into something like a smile as they ate and chatted and told good stories.

Lynch watched him with keen interest. He knew his history and character, and had built on his genius a brilliant scheme of life.

This man who meant to become the dictator of the Republic had come from the humblest early conditions. His father was a worthless character, from whom he had learned the trade of a shoemaker, but his mother, a woman of vigorous intellect and indomitable will, had succeeded in giving her lame boy a college education. He had early sworn to be a man of wealth, and to this purpose he had throttled the dreams and ideals of a wayward imagination.

His hope of great wealth had not been realized. His iron mills in Pennsylvania had been destroyed by Lee’s army. He had developed the habit of gambling, which brought its train of extravagant habits, tastes, and inevitable debts. In his vigorous manhood, in spite of his lameness, he had kept a pack of hounds and a stable of fine horses. He had used his skill in shoemaking to construct a set of stirrups to fit his lame feet, and had become an expert hunter to hounds.

One thing he never neglected – to be in his seat in the House of Representatives and wear its royal crown of leadership, sick or well, day or night. The love of power was the breath of his nostrils, and his ambitions had at one time been boundless. His enormous power to-day was due to the fact that he had given up all hope of office beyond the robes of the king of his party. He had been offered a cabinet position by the elder Harrison and for some reason it had been withdrawn. He had been promised a place in Lincoln’s cabinet, but some mysterious power had snatched it away. He was the one great man who had now no ambition for which to trim and fawn and lie, and for the very reason that he had abolished himself he was the most powerful leader who ever walked the halls of Congress.

His contempt for public opinion was boundless. Bold, original, scornful of advice, of all the men who ever lived in our history he was the one man born to rule in the chaos which followed the assassination of the chief magistrate.

Audacity was stamped in every line of his magnificent head. His choicest curses were for the cowards of his own party before whose blanched faces he shouted out the hidden things until they sank back in helpless silence and dismay. His speech was curt, his humour sardonic, his wit biting, cruel, and coarse.

The incarnate soul of revolution, he despised convention and ridiculed respectability.

There was but one weak spot in his armour – and the world never suspected it: the consuming passion with which he loved his two children. This was the side of his nature he had hidden from the eyes of man. A refined egotism, this passion, perhaps – for he meant to live his own life over in them – yet it was the one utterly human and lovable thing about him. And if his public policy was one of stupendous avarice, this dream of millions of confiscated wealth he meant to seize, it was not for himself but for his children.

As he looked at Howle and Lynch seated in his library after dinner, with his great plans seething in his brain, his eyes were flashing, intense, and fiery, yet without colour – simply two centres of cold light.

“Gentlemen,” he said at length. “I am going to ask you to undertake for the Government, the Nation, and yourselves a dangerous and important mission. I say yourselves, because, in spite of all our beautiful lies, self is the centre of all human action. Mr. Lincoln has fortunately gone to his reward – fortunately for him and for his country. His death was necessary to save his life. He was a useful man living, more useful dead. Our party has lost its first President, but gained a god – why mourn?”

“We will recover from our grief,” said Howle.

The old man went on, ignoring the interruption:

“Things have somehow come my way. I am almost persuaded late in life that the gods love me. The insane fury of the North against the South for a crime which they were the last people on earth to dream of committing is, of course, a power to be used – but with caution. The first execution of a Southern leader on such an idiotic charge would produce a revolution of sentiment. The people are an aggregation of hysterical fools.”

“I thought you favoured the execution of the leaders of the rebellion?” said Lynch with surprise.

“I did, but it is too late. Had they been tried by drum-head court-martial and shot dead red-handed as they stood on the field in their uniforms, all would have been well. Now sentiment is too strong. Grant showed his teeth to Stanton and he backed down from Lee’s arrest. Sherman refused to shake hands with Stanton on the grandstand the day his army passed in review, and it’s a wonder he didn’t knock him down. Sherman was denounced as a renegade and traitor for giving Joseph E. Johnston the terms Lincoln ordered him to give. Lincoln dead, his terms are treason! Yet had he lived, we should have been called upon to applaud his mercy and patriotism. How can a man live in this world and keep his face straight?”

“I believe God permitted Mr. Lincoln’s death to give the great Commoner, the Leader of Leaders, the right of way,” cried Lynch with enthusiasm.

The old man smiled. With all his fierce spirit he was as susceptible to flattery as a woman – far more so than the sleek brown woman who carried the keys of his house.

“The man at the other end of the avenue, who pretends to be President, in reality an alien of the conquered province of Tennessee, is pressing Lincoln’s plan of ‘restoring’ the Union. He has organized State governments in the South, and their senators and representatives will appear at the Capitol in December for admission to Congress. He thinks they will enter – ”

The old man broke into a low laugh and rubbed his hands.

“My full plans are not for discussion at this juncture. Suffice it to say, I mean to secure the future of our party and the safety of this nation. The one thing on which the success of my plan absolutely depends is the confiscation of the millions of acres of land owned by the white people of the South and its division among the negroes and those who fought and suffered in this war – ”

The old Commoner paused, pursed his lips, and fumbled his hands a moment, the nostrils of his eagle-beaked nose breathing rapacity, sensuality throbbing in his massive jaws, and despotism frowning from his heavy brows.

“Stanton will probably add to the hilarity of nations, and amuse himself by hanging a few rebels,” he went on, “but we will address ourselves to serious work. All men have their price, including the present company, with due apologies to the speaker – ”

Howle’s eyes danced, and he licked his lips.

“If I haven’t suffered in this war, who has?”

“Your reward will not be in accordance with your sufferings. It will be based on the efficiency with which you obey my orders. Read that – ”

He handed to him a piece of paper on which he had scrawled his secret instructions.

Another he gave to Lynch.

“Hand them back to me when you read them, and I will burn them. These instructions are not to pass the lips of any man until the time is ripe – four bare walls are not to hear them whispered.”

Both men handed to the leader the slips of paper simultaneously.

“Are we agreed, gentlemen?”

“Perfectly,” answered Howle.

“Your word is law to me, sir,” said Lynch.

“Then you will draw on me personally for your expenses, and leave for the South within forty-eight hours. I wish your reports delivered to me two weeks before the meeting of Congress.”

As Lynch passed through the hall on his way to the door, the brown woman bade him good-night and pressed into his hand a letter.

As his yellow fingers closed on the missive, his eyes flashed for a moment with catlike humour.

The woman’s face wore the mask of a sphinx.

CHAPTER II

Sweethearts

When the first shock of horror at her husband’s peril passed, it left a strange new light in Mrs. Cameron’s eyes.

The heritage of centuries of heroic blood from the martyrs of old Scotland began to flash its inspiration from the past. Her heart beat with the unconscious life of men and women who had stood in the stocks, and walked in chains to the stake with songs on their lips.

The threat against the life of Doctor Cameron had not only stirred her martyr blood: it had roused the latent heroism of a beautiful girlhood. To her he had ever been the lover and the undimmed hero of her girlish dreams. She spent whole hours locked in her room alone. Margaret knew that she was on her knees. She always came forth with shining face and with soft words on her lips.

She struggled for two months in vain efforts to obtain a single interview with him, or to obtain a copy of the charges. Doctor Cameron had been placed in the old Capitol Prison, already crowded to the utmost. He was in delicate health, and so ill when she had left home he could not accompany her to Richmond.

Not a written or spoken word was allowed to pass those prison doors. She could communicate with him only through the officers in charge. Every message from him was the same. “I love you always. Do not worry. Go home the moment you can leave Ben. I fear the worst at Piedmont.”

When he had sent this message, he would sit down and write the truth in a little diary he kept:

“Another day of anguish. How long, O Lord? Just one touch of her hand, one last pressure of her lips, and I am content. I have no desire to live – I am tired.”

The officers repeated the verbal messages, but they made no impression on Mrs. Cameron. By a mental telepathy which had always linked her life with his her soul had passed those prison bars. If he had written the pitiful record with a dagger’s point on her heart, she could not have felt it more keenly.

At times overwhelmed, she lay prostrate and sobbed in half-articulate cries. And then from the silence and mystery of the spirit world in which she felt the beat of the heart of Eternal Love would come again the strange peace that passeth understanding. She would rise and go forth to her task with a smile.

In July she saw Mrs. Surratt taken from this old Capitol Prison to be hung with Payne, Herold, and Atzerodt for complicity in the assassination. The military commission before whom this farce of justice was enacted, suspicious of the testimony of the perjured wretches who had sworn her life away, had filed a memorandum with their verdict asking the President for mercy.

President Johnson never saw this memorandum. It was secretly removed in the War Department, and only replaced after he had signed the death warrant.

In vain Annie Surratt, the weeping daughter, flung herself on the steps of the White House on the fatal day, begging and praying to see the President. She could not believe they would allow her mother to be murdered in the face of a recommendation of mercy. The fatal hour struck at last, and the girl left the White House with set eyes and blanched face, muttering incoherent curses.

The Chief Magistrate sat within, unconscious of the hideous tragedy that was being enacted in his name. When he discovered the infamy by which he had been made the executioner of an innocent woman, he made his first demand that Edwin M. Stanton resign from his cabinet as Secretary of War. And for the first time in the history of America, a cabinet officer waived the question of honour and refused to resign.

With a shudder and blush of shame, strong men saw that day the executioner gather the ropes tightly three times around the dress of an innocent American mother and bind her ankles with cords. She fainted and sank backward upon the attendants, the poor limbs yielding at last to the mortal terror of death. But they propped her up and sprung the fatal trap.

A feeling of uncertainty and horror crept over the city and the Nation, as rumours of the strange doings of the “Bureau of Military Justice,” with its secret factory of testimony and powers of tampering with verdicts, began to find their way in whispered stories among the people.

Public opinion, however, had as yet no power of adjustment. It was an hour of lapse to tribal insanity. Things had gone wrong. The demand for a scapegoat, blind, savage, and unreasoning, had not spent itself. The Government could do anything as yet, and the people would applaud.

Mrs. Cameron had tried in vain to gain a hearing before the President. Each time she was directed to apply to Mr. Stanton. She refused to attempt to see him, and again turned to Elsie for help. She had learned that the same witnesses who had testified against Mrs. Surratt were being used to convict Doctor Cameron, and her heart was sick with fear.

“Ask your father,” she pleaded, “to write President Johnson a letter in my behalf. Whatever his politics, he can’t be your father and not be good at heart.”

Elsie paled for a moment. It was the one request she had dreaded. She thought of her father and Stanton with dread. How far he was supporting the Secretary of War she could only vaguely guess. He rarely spoke of politics to her, much as he loved her.

“I’ll try, Mrs. Cameron,” she faltered. “My father is in town to-day and takes dinner with us before he leaves for Pennsylvania to-night. I’ll go at once.”

With fear, and yet boldly, she went straight home to present her request. She knew he was a man who never cherished small resentments, however cruel and implacable might be his public policies. And yet she dreaded to put it to the test.

“Father, I’ve a very important request to make of you,” she said gravely.

“Very well, my child, you need not be so solemn. What is it?”

“I’ve some friends in great distress – Mrs. Cameron, of South Carolina, and her daughter Margaret.”

“Friends of yours?” he asked with an incredulous smile. “Where on earth did you find them?”

“In the hospital, of course. Mrs. Cameron is not allowed to see her husband, who has been here in jail for over two months. He cannot write to her, nor can he receive a letter from her. He is on trial for his life, is ill and helpless, and is not allowed to know the charges against him, while hired witnesses and detectives have broken open his house, searched his papers, and are ransacking heaven and earth to convict him of a crime of which he never dreamed. It’s a shame. You don’t approve of such things, I know?”

“What’s the use of my expressing an opinion when you have already settled it?” he answered good-humouredly.

“You don’t approve of such injustice?”

“Certainly not, my child. Stanton’s frantic efforts to hang a lot of prominent Southern men for complicity in Booth’s crime is sheer insanity. Nobody who has any sense believes them guilty. As a politician I use popular clamour for my purposes, but I am not an idiot. When I go gunning, I never use a popgun or hunt small game.”

“Then you will write the President a letter asking that they be allowed to see Doctor Cameron?”

The old man frowned.

“Think, father, if you were in jail and friendless, and I were trying to see you – ”

“Tut, tut, my dear, it’s not that I am unwilling – I was only thinking of the unconscious humour of my making a request of the man who at present accidentally occupies the White House. Of all the men on earth, this alien from the province of Tennessee! But I’ll do it for you. When did you ever know me to deny my help to a weak man or woman in distress?”

“Never, father. I was sure you would do it,” she answered warmly.

He wrote the letter at once and handed it to her.

She bent and kissed him.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to know that you have no part in such injustice.”

“You should not have believed me such a fool, but I’ll forgive you for the kiss. Run now with this letter to your rebel friends, you little traitor! Wait a minute – ”

He shuffled to his feet, placed his hand tenderly on her head, and stooped and kissed the shining hair.

“I wonder if you know how I love you? How I’ve dreamed of your future? I may not see you every day as I wish; I’m absorbed in great affairs. But more and more I think of you and Phil. I’ll have a big surprise for you both some day.”

“Your love is all I ask,” she answered simply.

Within an hour, Mrs. Cameron found herself before the new President. The letter had opened the door as by magic. She poured out her story with impetuous eloquence while Mr. Johnson listened in uneasy silence. His ruddy face, his hesitating manner, and restless eyes were in striking contrast to the conscious power of the tall dark man who had listened so tenderly and sympathetically to her story of Ben but a few weeks before.

The President asked:

“Have you seen Mr. Stanton?”

“I have seen him once,” she cried with sudden passion. “It is enough. If that man were God on His throne, I would swear allegiance to the devil and fight him!”

The President lifted his eyebrows and his lips twitched with a smile:

“I shouldn’t say that your spirits are exactly drooping! I’d like to be near and hear you make that remark to the distinguished Secretary of War.”

“Will you grant my prayer?” she pleaded.

“I will consider the matter,” he promised evasively.

Mrs. Cameron’s heart sank.

“Mr. President,” she cried bitterly, “I have felt sure that I had but to see you face to face and you could not deny me. Surely it is but justice that he have the right to see his loved ones, to consult with counsel, to know the charges against him, and defend his life when attacked in his poverty and ruin by all the power of a mighty government? He is feeble and broken in health and suffering from wounds received carrying the flag of the Union to victory in Mexico. Whatever his errors of judgment in this war, it is a shame that a Nation for which he once bared his breast in battle should treat him as an outlaw without a trial.”

“You must remember, madam,” interrupted the President, “that these are extraordinary times, and that popular clamour, however unjust, will make itself felt and must be heeded by those in power. I am sorry for you, and I trust it may be possible for me to grant your request.”

“But I wish it now,” she urged. “He sends me word I must go home. I can’t leave without seeing him. I will die first.”

She drew closer and continued in throbbing tones:

“Mr. President, you are a native Carolinian – you are of Scotch Covenanter blood. You are of my own people of the great past, whose tears and sufferings are our common glory and birthright. Come, you must hear me – I will take no denial. Give me now the order to see my husband!”

The President hesitated, struggling with deep emotion, called his secretary, and gave the order.

As she hurried away with Elsie, who insisted on accompanying her to the jail door, the girl said:

“Mrs. Cameron, I fear you are without money. You must let me help you until you can return it.”

“You are the dearest little heart I’ve met in all the world, I think sometimes,” said the older woman, looking at her tenderly. “I wonder how I can ever pay you for half you’ve done already.”