The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

“You don’t say so!” cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. “Isn’t your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?”

“Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman.”

“Enlighten me further.”

“I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is after all a very inferior animal – nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life – did you?”

“Come to think of it, I never did,” acknowledged Ben with comic gravity. “What else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I’m studying law, you know.”

“I have a personality of my own. You and your kind assume the right to absorb all lesser lights.”

“Certainly, I’m a man.”

“I don’t care to be absorbed by a mere man.”

“Don’t wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?”

“I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a home. I have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook and housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another grows, expands, and claims the lordship of the world. I can sing. My voice is to me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual companion who will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel within to its highest reach.”

She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben’s brown eyes, about which a smile was constantly playing. He looked away, and again the river echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite of herself. He laughed with boyish gayety. It danced in his eyes, and gave spring to every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its contagion enfold her.

His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he sang, “If you get there before I do, tell ’em I’m comin’ too!”

As Elsie listened, her anger grew as she recalled the amazing folly that had induced her to tell the secret feelings of her inmost soul to this man almost a stranger. Whence came this miracle of influence about him, this gift of intimacy? She felt a shock as if she had been immodest. She was in an agony of doubt as to what he was thinking of her, and dreaded to meet his gaze.

And yet, when he turned toward her, his whole being a smiling compound of dark Southern blood and bone and fire, at the sound of his voice all doubt and questioning melted.

“Do you know,” he said earnestly, “that you are the funniest, most charming girl I ever met?”

“Thanks. I’ve heard your experience has been large for one of your age.”

Ben’s eyes danced.

“Perhaps, yes. You appeal to things in me that I didn’t know were there – to all the senses of body and soul at once. Your strength of mind, with its conceits, and your quick little temper seem so odd and out of place, clothed in the gentleness of your beauty.”

“I was never more serious in my life. There are other things more personal about you that I do not like.”

“What?”

“Your cavalier habits.”

“Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are all Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy loafing dreamers is a myth. I was raised on the catechism.”

“You love to fish and hunt and frolic – you flirt with every girl you meet, and you drink sometimes. I often feel that you are cruel and that I do not know you.”

Ben’s face grew serious, and the red scar in the edge of his hair suddenly became livid with the rush of blood.

“Perhaps I don’t mean that you shall know all yet,” he said slowly. “My ideal of a man is one that leads, charms, dominates, and yet eludes. I confess that I’m close kin to an angel and a devil, and that I await a woman’s hand to lead me into the ways of peace and life.”

The spiritual earnestness of the girl was quick to catch the subtle appeal of his last words. His broad, high forehead, straight, masterly nose, with its mobile nostrils, seemed to her very manly at just that moment and very appealing. A soft answer was on her lips.

He saw it, and leaned toward her in impulsive tenderness. A timid look on her face caused him to sink back in silence.

They had now drifted near the city. The sun was slowly sinking in a smother of fiery splendour that mirrored its changing hues in the still water. The hush of the harvest fullness of autumn life was over all nature. They passed a camp of soldiers and then a big hospital on the banks above. A gun flashed from the hill, and the flag dropped from its staff.

The girl’s eyes lingered on the flower in his coat a moment and then on the red scar in the edge of his dark hair, and somehow the difference between them seemed to melt into the falling twilight. Only his nearness was real. Again a strange joy held her.

He threw her a look of tenderness, and she began to tremble. A sea gull poised a moment above them and broke into a laugh.

Bending nearer, he gently took her hand, and said:

“I love you!”

A sob caught her breath and she buried her face on her arm.

“I am for you, and you are for me. Why beat your wings against the thing that is and must be? What else matters? With all my sins and faults my land is yours – a land of sunshine, eternal harvests, and everlasting song, old-fashioned and provincial perhaps, but kind and hospitable. Around its humblest cottage song birds live and mate and nest and never leave. The winged ones of your own cold fields have heard their call, and the sky to-night will echo with their chatter as they hurry southward. Elsie, my own, I too have called – come; I love you!”

She lifted her face to him full of tender spiritual charm, her eyes burning their passionate answer.

He bent and kissed her.

“Say it! Say it!” he whispered.

“I love you!” she sighed.

CHAPTER VI

The Gauge of Battle

The day of the first meeting of the National Congress after the war was one of intense excitement. The galleries of the House were packed. Elsie was there with Ben in a fever of secret anxiety lest the stirring drama should cloud her own life. She watched her father limp to his seat with every eye fixed on him.

The President had pursued with persistence the plan of Lincoln for the immediate restoration of the Union. Would Congress follow the lead of the President or challenge him to mortal combat?

Civil governments had been restored in all the Southern States, with men of the highest ability chosen as governors and lawmakers. Their legislatures had unanimously voted for the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery, and elected senators and representatives to Congress. Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, had declared the new amendment a part of the organic law of the Nation by the vote of these States.

General Grant went to the South to report its condition and boldly declared:

“I am satisfied that the mass of thinking people of the South accept the situation in good faith. Slavery and secession they regard as settled forever by the highest known tribunal, and consider this decision a fortunate one for the whole country.”

Would the Southerners be allowed to enter?

Amid breathless silence the clerk rose to call the roll of members-elect. Every ear was bent to hear the name of the first Southern man. Not one was called! The Master had spoken. His clerk knew how to play his part.

The next business of the House was to receive the message of the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.

The message came, but not from the White House. It came from the seat of the Great Commoner.

As the first thrill of excitement over the challenge to the President slowly subsided, Stoneman rose, planted his big club foot in the middle of the aisle, and delivered to Congress the word of its new master.

It was Ben’s first view of the man of all the world just now of most interest. From his position he could see his full face and figure.

He began speaking in a careless, desultory way. His tone was loud yet not declamatory, at first in a grumbling, grandfatherly, half-humorous, querulous accent that riveted every ear instantly. A sort of drollery of a contagious kind haunted it. Here and there a member tittered in expectation of a flash of wit.

His figure was taller than the average, slightly bent, with a dignity which suggested reserve power and contempt for his audience. One knew instinctively that back of the boldest word this man might say there was a bolder unspoken word he had chosen not to speak.

His limbs were long, and their movements slow, yet nervous as from some internal fiery force. His hands were big and ugly, and always in ungraceful fumbling motion as though a separate soul dwelt within them.

The heaped-up curly profusion of his brown wig gave a weird impression to the spread of his mobile features. His eagle-beaked nose had three distinct lines and angles. His chin was broad and bold, and his brows beetling and projecting. His mouth was wide, marked, and grim; when opened, deep and cavernous; when closed, it seemed to snap so tightly that the lower lip protruded.

Of all his make-up, his eye was the most fascinating, and it held Ben spellbound. It could thrill to the deepest fibre of the soul that looked into it, yet it did not gleam. It could dominate, awe, and confound, yet it seemed to have no colour or fire. He could easily see it across the vast hall from the galleries, yet it was not large. Two bold, colourless dagger-points of light they seemed. As he grew excited, they darkened as if passing under a cloud.

A sudden sweep of his huge apelike arm in an angular gesture, and the drollery and carelessness of his voice were riven from it as by a bolt of lightning.

He was driving home his message now in brutal frankness. Yet in the height of his fiercest invective he never seemed to strengthen himself or call on his resources. In its climax he was careless, conscious of power, and contemptuous of results, as though as a gambler he had staked and lost all and in the moment of losing suddenly become the master of those who had beaten him.

His speech never once bent to persuade or convince. He meant to brain the opposition with a single blow, and he did it. For he suddenly took the breath from his foes by shouting in their faces the hidden motive of which they were hoping to accuse him!

“Admit these Southern Representatives,” he cried, “and with the Democrats elected from the North, within one term they will have a majority in Congress and the Electoral College. The supremacy of our party’s life is at stake. The man who dares palter with such a measure is a rebel, a traitor to his party and his people.”

A cheer burst from his henchmen, and his foes sat in dazed stupor at his audacity. He moved the appointment of a “Committee on Reconstruction” to whom the entire government of the “conquered provinces of the South” should be committed, and to whom all credentials of their pretended representatives should be referred.

He sat down as the Speaker put his motion, declared it carried, and quickly announced the names of this Imperial Committee with the Hon. Austin Stoneman as its chairman.

He then permitted the message of the President of the United States to be read by his clerk.

“Well, upon my soul,” said Ben, taking a deep breath and looking at Elsie, “he’s the whole thing, isn’t he?”

The girl smiled with pride.

“Yes; he is a genius. He was born to command and yet never could resist the cry of a child or the plea of a woman. He hates, but he hates ideas and systems. He makes threats, yet when he meets the man who stands for all he hates he falls in love with his enemy.”

“Then there’s hope for me?”

“Yes, but I must be the judge of the time to speak.”

“Well, if he looks at me as he did once to-day, you may have to do the speaking also.”

“You will like him when you know him. He is one of the greatest men in America.”

“At least he’s the father of the greatest girl in the world, which is far more important.”

“I wonder if you know how important?” she asked seriously. “He is the apple of my eye. His bitter words, his cynicism and sarcasm, are all on the surface – masks that hide a great sensitive spirit. You can’t know with what brooding tenderness I have always loved and worshipped him. I will never marry against his wishes.”

“I hope he and I will always be good friends,” said Ben doubtfully.

“You must,” she replied, eagerly pressing his hand.

CHAPTER VII

A Woman Laughs

Each day the conflict waxed warmer between the President and the Commoner.

The first bill sent to the White House to Africanize the “conquered provinces” the President vetoed in a message of such logic, dignity, and power, the old leader found to his amazement it was impossible to rally the two-thirds majority to pass it over his head.

At first, all had gone as planned. Lynch and Howle brought to him a report on “Southern Atrocities,” secured through the councils of the secret oath-bound Union League, which had destroyed the impression of General Grant’s words and prepared his followers for blind submission to his Committee.

Yet the rally of a group of men in defence of the Constitution had given the President unexpected strength.

Stoneman saw that he must hold his hand on the throat of the South and fight another campaign. Howle and Lynch furnished the publication committee of the Union League the matter, and they printed four million five hundred thousand pamphlets on “Southern Atrocities.”

The Northern States were hostile to negro suffrage, the first step of his revolutionary programme, and not a dozen men in Congress had yet dared to favour it. Ohio, Michigan, New York, and Kansas had rejected it by overwhelming majorities. But he could appeal to their passions and prejudices against the “Barbarism” of the South. It would work like magic. When he had the South where he wanted it, he would turn and ram negro suffrage and negro equality down the throats of the reluctant North.

His energies were now bent to prevent any effective legislation in Congress until his strength should be omnipotent.

A cloud disturbed the sky for a moment in the Senate. John Sherman, of Ohio, began to loom on the horizon as a constructive statesman, and without consulting him was quietly forcing over Sumner’s classic oratory a Reconstruction Bill restoring the Southern States to the Union on the basis of Lincoln’s plan, with no provision for interference with the suffrage. It had gone to its last reading, and the final vote was pending.

The house was in session at 3 a. m., waiting in feverish anxiety the outcome of this struggle in the Senate.

Old Stoneman was in his seat, fast asleep from the exhaustion of an unbroken session of forty hours. His meals he had sent to his desk from the Capitol restaurant. He was seventy-four years old and not in good health, yet his energy was tireless, his resources inexhaustible, and his audacity matchless.

Sunset Cox, the wag of the House, an opponent but personal friend of the old Commoner, passing his seat and seeing the great head sunk on his breast in sleep, laughed softly and said:

“Mr. Speaker!”

The presiding officer recognized the young Democrat with a nod of answering humour and responded:

“The gentleman from New York.”

“I move you, sir,” said Cox, “that, in view of the advanced age and eminent services of the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, the Sergeant-at-Arms be instructed to furnish him with enough poker chips to last till morning!”

The scattered members who were awake roared with laughter, the Speaker pounded furiously with his gavel, the sleepy little pages jumped up, rubbing their eyes, and ran here and there answering imaginary calls, and the whole House waked to its usual noise and confusion.

The old man raised his massive head and looked to the door leading toward the Senate just as Sumner rushed through. He had slept for a moment, but his keen intellect had taken up the fight at precisely the point at which he left it.

Sumner approached his desk rapidly, leaned over, and reported his defeat and Sherman’s triumph.

“For God’s sake throttle this measure in the House or we are ruined!” he exclaimed.

“Don’t be alarmed,” replied the cynic. “I’ll be here with stronger weapons than articulated wind.”

“You have not a moment to lose. The bill is on its way to the Speaker’s desk, and Sherman’s men are going to force its passage to-night.”

The Senator returned to the other end of the Capitol wrapped in the mantle of his outraged dignity, and in thirty minutes the bill was defeated, and the House adjourned.

As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:

“How did you do it?”

Stoneman’s huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:

“I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if they would join with me and defeat this bill, I’d give them a better one the next session. And I will – negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it whole!”

Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.

The Great Commoner laughed as he departed:

“He is yet too good for this world, but he’ll forget it before we’re done this fight.”

On the steps a beggar asked him for a night’s lodging, and he tossed him a gold eagle.

The North, which had rejected negro suffrage for itself with scorn, answered Stoneman’s fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.

So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the very existence of Stanton’s prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten, and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that Andrew Johnson was from Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under Stoneman’s assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance with Lincoln’s plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting favour of traitors and rebels.

Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him, and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial, impeachment, and removal from office.

Again Stoneman passed his first act to reduce the “conquered provinces” of the South to negro rule.

President Johnson vetoed it with a message of such logic in defence of the constitutional rights of the States that it failed by one vote to find the two-thirds majority needed to become a law without his approval.

The old Commoner’s eyes froze into two dagger-points of icy light when this vote was announced.

With fury he cursed the President, but above all he cursed the men of his own party who had faltered.

As he fumbled his big hands nervously, he growled:

“If I only had five men of genuine courage in Congress, I’d hang the man at the other end of the avenue from the porch of the White House! But I haven’t got them – cowards, dastards, dolts, and snivelling fools – ”

His decision was instantly made. He would expel enough Democrats from the Senate and the House to place his two-thirds majority beyond question. The name of the President never passed his lips. He referred to him always, even in public debate, as “the man at the other end of the avenue,” or “the former Governor of Tennessee who once threatened rebels – the late lamented Andrew Johnson, of blessed memory.”

He ordered the expulsion of the new member of the House from Indiana, Daniel W. Voorhees, and the new Senator from New Jersey, John P. Stockton. This would give him a majority of two thirds composed of men who would obey his word without a question.

Voorhees heard of the edict with indignant wrath. He had met Stoneman in the lobbies, where he was often the centre of admiring groups of friends. His wit and audacity, and, above all, his brutal frankness, had won the admiration of the “Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.” He could not believe such a man would be a party to a palpable fraud. He appealed to him personally:

“Look here, Stoneman,” the young orator cried with wrath, “I appeal to your sense of honour and decency. My credentials have been accepted by your own committee, and my seat been awarded me. My majority is unquestioned. This is a high-handed outrage. You cannot permit this crime.”

The old man thrust his deformed foot out before him, struck it meditatively with his cane, and looking Voorhees straight in the eye, boldly said:

“There’s nothing the matter with your majority, young man. I’ve no doubt it’s all right. Unfortunately, you are a Democrat, and happen to be the odd man in the way of the two-thirds majority on which the supremacy of my party depends. You will have to go. Come back some other time.” And he did.

In the Senate there was a hitch. When the vote was taken on the expulsion of Stockton, to the amazement of the leader it was a tie.

He hobbled into the Senate Chamber, with the steel point of his cane ringing on the marble flags as though he were thrusting it through the vitals of the weakling who had sneaked and hedged and trimmed at the crucial moment.

He met Howle at the door.

“What’s the matter in there?” he asked.

“They’re trying to compromise.”

“Compromise – the Devil of American politics,” he muttered. “But how did the vote fail – it was all fixed before the roll-call?”

“Roman, of Maine, has trouble with his conscience! He is paired not to vote on this question with Stockton’s colleague, who is sick in Trenton. His ‘honour’ is involved, and he refuses to break his word.”

“I see,” said Stoneman, pulling his bristling brows down until his eyes were two beads of white gleaming through them. “Tell Wade to summon every member of the party in his room immediately and hold the Senate in session.”

When the group of Senators crowded into the Vice-president’s room the old man faced them leaning on his cane and delivered an address of five minutes they never forgot.

His speech had a nameless fascination. The man himself with his elemental passions was a wonder. He left on public record no speech worth reading, and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance. As the nostrils of his big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the clutch of a tiger, his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder, and his big deformed foot seemed to grip the floor as the claw of a beast.

“The life of a political party, gentlemen,” he growled in conclusion, “is maintained by a scheme of subterfuges in which the moral law cuts no figure. As your leader, I know but one law – success. The world is full of fools who must have toys with which to play. A belief in politics is the favourite delusion of shallow American minds. But you and I have no delusions. Your life depends on this vote. If any man thinks the abstraction called ‘honour’ is involved, let him choose between his honour and his life! I call no names. This issue must be settled now before the Senate adjourns. There can be no to-morrow. It is life or death. Let the roll be called again immediately.”

The grave Senators resumed their seats, and Wade, the acting Vice-president, again put the question to Stockton’s expulsion.

The member from New England sat pale and trembling, in his soul the anguish of the mortal combat between his Puritan conscience, the iron heritage of centuries, and the order of his captain.

When the Clerk of the Senate called his name, still the battle raged. He sat in silence, the whiteness of death about his lips, while the clerk at a signal from the Chair paused.

And then a scene the like of which was never known in American history! August Senators crowded around his desk, begging, shouting, imploring, and demanding that a fellow Senator break his solemn word of honour!

For a moment pandemonium reigned.

“Vote! Vote! Call his name again!” they shouted.