Chapter 18: Purcell

Sam Warren led a considerably larger delegation to the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in June of ‘72 than Gabe Lincoln had led to Chicago four years earlier.

The state now had 14 electoral votes, and it had gone solidly Republican in ‘68.

The delegation still could not stay in the hotels that most of the delegations used, but travel distance was shorter, perhaps because the city was more compact. Randolph and most of the other whites stayed at the regular, white, hotels.

Grant’s election had been as close to a consensus as the country had reached since the era of good feeling, but his re-election would not be. That made Alabama more important

The nomination was not in doubt, but the platform was challenged. A speaker dealt at length with the necessity of “healing the rupture between the sections.”

Sam rose to respond.

“The chair recognizes General Sam Warren.”

“Mr. Chairman, the previous speaker said that the Party should be generous to the south. As the chairman of the delegation from a southern state, you might think I would be gratified. I somehow suspect, though, that I wasn’t included in the south that he was interested in placating.

“You have to understand that not all the southerners were involved in making war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. The former slaves were not willingly involved, and most of them were not involved at all. There were white unionists in the south, too, and I have met some. Let me tell you, you might be willing to forgive the disloyalty of the disloyal. They are totally unwilling to forgive the loyalty that the minority showed.

“They call the white loyalists scalawags, and they don’t intend to forgive them ever. They don’t much forgive voting Republican, either.

“They call me a carpetbagger. They call the troops which risked their lives to bring the prisoners out of Andersonville niggers. They say that those troops shouldn’t vote, but the guards should

“Remember, these men surrendered once. What they tell you they will do is covered by what they told you they would do before.

“Mr. Chairman, I say that I don’t want peace with traitors, and I especially don’t want it so much that I’m ready to betray men who fought by my side to get it.”

He got some applause, but it didn’t sound as loud as the applause for the previous speaker.

The race for vice president was hotter than the race -- at the convention -- for president. Sam didn’t understand the issues, and he freed the delegates to make their own choices.

“Don’t follow me,” he said. “I’m voting blind.” He finally ended up voting for Wilson, as did most of the delegation. They might have been following his lead; they might have preferred a Massachusetts accent which reminded them of some teacher.

Deborah had two pieces of news waiting for her husband when he got back. she decided to save the gossip and go with the personal news.

When Sam had checked at the store, read to Tertius, and eaten his supper, she waited for him in bed.

“It has been a while,” she said. “We may be having another baby.”

Sam kissed her, kissing her belly in a pause between kissing her lips. The news did not distract him from wanting her, but she had not really expected it to.

“Remember that Ab who helped you on the map?” she asked at breakfast when he had drained his coffee and set the cup down.

“Remember him well. Ab is a good man.”

“Marjorie seems to agree with you. She is going to marry him.”

“She is what?” Sam nearly exploded, but she had been careful to tell him when his mouth was empty.

“It hasn’t been publicly announced yet, but the teachers know.”

“Well, when it’s public knowledge, let me know.” Sam suspected that he might panic Ab if he congratulated him before that point. Somebody had probably told Deb in confidence who had been told on condition of not telling anybody. -- either Miss Nelson or Miss Rawlings. ‘ ‘

Sam had spent his first three years in the army reading the papers to find out where the generals were sending him and the last year of the war getting confidential briefings in staff meetings to tell him things that the reporters were already asking him about. When someone told him, “You can’t tell,” he didn’t. He didn’t expect the secret to stay secret, though.

“I need to organize the militia better this summer,” he told her. “After picking is the time for action, but we can talk between planting and picking.”

“Very well, when are you leaving?”

“I have to spend a night in Montgomery starting tomorrow.” Only one passenger train a day each way stopped at the station, and then only when you flagged it or told the conductor when you got on. If he had business in Montgomery, he stayed overnight, or he took the shay.

“I’ll repack your bag,” Deborah said.

“Thanks. I’ll bring some more paper to put in them.

Sam greeted young Jeff when he came. Then he took the dining room to lay out his plans. A township contained 35 sections subject to grants and another section which could be leased out to support the common school. These days, hired labor was scarce and land ownership was widespread; damned few people were interested in leasing land. Anyway, 35 sections meant 140 quarter sections. That could be 280 veterans’ grants or 560 freedmen’s grants.

In practice, a significant portion of that land was owned by whites and another portion was under water or otherwise unavailable to grant. And there never was a township with all veterans or no veterans.

Something like 60,000 veterans had received grants in Alabama, and fewer than 240,000 freedmen had last time Sam heard. That would be 360,000 quarter quarter sections, or 90,000 quarter sections or 22,500 square miles. That did not include sections for lease.

Central Alabama, which included most of the granted land, but not all, was maybe 60% of Alabama’s 52,000 square miles. Call it 30,000. That would have 5/6 of a thousand, call it a thousand, square miles of land for lease. Of 30,000 square miles, 100 still owned by the townships and 22,500 granted to Negroes, that would leave 6,500 or more than a third of what had been granted, in the hands of whites, on average.

In starting the militia, he didn’t need to deal with townships with major white ownership. He was limited to his own efforts for the most part, and he couldn’t get to most townships; he couldn’t even get to most counties. So, he wouldn’t bother with a township unless it was 3/4 granted. What was that? 420 quarter quarter sections granted.

His other idea was based on his observation that not enough of the men he wanted to recruit knew each other. Those who had been freed from the same plantation and granted land close together had maintained their friendships. so, to a lesser extent had those from neighboring plantations. He wanted the veterans who would be the officers to do the organizing, though, and they didn’t usually know their neighbors.

If the experience of Deb’s old school carried over to the new schools that the state Board of education had established, however, the people around those schools knew each other.

He’d go to Montgomery and ask Pearson for the list of those townships. Then, he’d get the grant records for the townships in the right counties. If the Board of Education was establishing a hundred new schools a year, then they were establishing two a year in the average county.

While in Montgomery, he’d visit the Freedman’s Bureau to see what the grant situation was in those townships.

He was still deep in his plans when there was a knock on the kitchen door. Deb as in the parlor with Tertius and Jeff. He got the door.

‘Boot Franklin,” he acknowledged. “What can I do for you? You’re about up to me in reckoning.”

“General, do you know about any job that can use my reckoning. I’m about played out at home, and all the girls are took.”

“I don’t know of any. My own store has all the help we need, all we can afford. I may be able to ask around, though.” He kept hearing that there was a shortage of competent staff that wanted the new state agencies to succeed.

“Thank you, General.” Franklin went out the kitchen door. Sam was tempted to tell him to knock on the front door the next time, but that would have disturbed Deb and, maybe, woken Tertius. They didn’t really have a parlor until Jeff, Senior, finished up.

In Montgomery the next day, Sam called on Pearson. Pearson told him what to ask for and which clerk to ask.

“By the way,” Sam said, “do you have any use for a clerk who is real good with numbers? His reading and writing skills are about what you would expect from several years of night school, but he can reckon as well as most graduates of the common school I attended in Illinois. His mental reckoning is better than most of them.”

“What is his hand like?”

“I’ve only seen his written numbers, but those were quite legible.”

“Write him a letter of recommendation and send him to me with it,” Ralph Pearson said. He was quite willing to give patronage to a senator on the Education committee, especially a cooperative one. Ralph would be damned, however, before he gave a place to an incompetent. He thought, too, that Warren had asked his favors in the wrong order. The records of what schools had been established were public records, available to anyone. Warren should have asked for his patronage first.

After visiting the proper clerk, Sam put the lists of schools established in each of three years in his pocket. Mostly, they would be for later.

At the Bureau, David Clarke told him that not all the records were there. The Bureau had branch offices, some of which kept their own records., Luckily, the records he wanted, for Calhoun and St. Claire counties and for his own county of Lowndes, were kept in Montgomery. Calhoun had had six and the other two had had five schools each established in the first two years. Sam realized that the Board was concentrating, as he was, on the areas with greatest Negro population.

He recorded the former sergeants who got grants in the townships with schools. Sergeants were less important in these townships. Presumably, the rest of the veterans were literate by now.

It took him well into the next morning to copy all that data down. Then, he went home.

Marjorie had been hesitating to write this letter, but delay wasn’t making it an easier.

Dear Mother,

Please let the rest of the family read this or read it to them.

I am engaged to be married.
His name is Absalom, or Ab for short. He is one of my students, by far the most intelligent.
He is very light-skinned for a Negro and looks very attractive.
We plan for the wedding to be in July. Most weddings around here are Sunday after church, and-- ours will be, too.

Love to you all,
Marjorie

Ab was sitting in his cabin after a day of hoeing. Some days he so much missed wrestling with Moby Dick that he lit his lamp and reread some chapter. This wasn’t one of those days, and he was sitting in the dark. There came a knock on his door.

“Who is it?” he called. Tina, Cellus, and their children usually called out instead of knocking.

“Sam Warren.”

“Just a second, General.” He went to the door. The quarter moon gave enough light to show the general. “Wasn’t expecting visitors.” He was wearing pants but neither shoes nor shirt.

“I understand that you are marrying Teacher Purcell.” That was Ab’s understanding, too, but she wanted him to call her ‘Marjorie.’

“Yes, sir.”

“Congratulations,” Sam said. “You going to live here?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well,” the general said, “Massachusetts ladies expect some niceties. Can you take the day off tomorrow without the weeds choking off the cotton?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why don’t I come back in the morning? I can look at the place and suggest what else to buy.”

“Thank You?” Ab said.

Now that he was aware of his visitor, he could hear the harness jingle as the general rode away.

As he had promised, the general came back in the morning. He arrived at nearly 8:00 by the clock.

“May I come in and look around?” he asked. “Okay. You need a bed, a bed with a feather mattress. A Yankee woman doesn’t cook on a Franklin stove. I’ll show you when we get to town. You wash in the branch?”

“Yes sir.” If he didn’t, the general should be able to smell it.

“Well, even if it feels better in this weather, Yankee ladies don’t bathe outdoors. You need a bathtub. I carry those, but not most of what you’ll need.”

The general left Stepper in Ab’s stable, still saddled. They took the mule cart to his store and got the things he said Ab needed there. Ab signed for the full amount. Before they rode away, the general went into his house for a package.

“I should ask you before we go,” the general said. “Do you have money in the Freedman’s Savings Bank?”

Ab told him how much.

“Good. You should draw it out for these purchases. Look, for these stores, maybe I should be the shopper and you should be the man driving my mule cart.”

“They wouldn’t like selling to me?” Ab asked.

“Or they would try to cheat you.”

“Yes, Massa.” Ab had to trust the general.

Before they got to town, they stopped at a branch. The general had brought dinner for both of them.

After a long time of shopping, they returned with the wagon loaded. Sam helped Ab move everything into the house.

“One more thing you have to buy,” Sam said as he handed Ab the rest of the money and the ring. “Yankee ladies need a privy, a shithouse. If you don’t know another carpenter who works growing season, Jeff Ralston, who has done some work on my house, works all year around.”

“If you want to give Marjorie and Ab a wedding gift,” he said to Deb when he got back to the house, “They don’t have curtains.”

“I must say,” Deborah responded, “you are taking this more positively than I might have expected.”

Even before joining the army, Sam had been motivated by loyalty to his friends. Four years of war had polished that. As far as his emotions went, the school was Deborah’s family, a family he had married into. He was loyal to Deb and her family. If Miss Purcell wanted to marry Ab and the other teachers supported her, then that was his position.

Then, too, his political agenda was building a functioning society in Black Alabama. He couldn’t be a leader in that if he upheld segregation.

Sam stayed home for a few more days. Sunday, he played with Tertius and then read to him while he was falling asleep. He made love to his wife.

Monday, he set off to Calhoun county. He could get a train at the station, but getting Stepper on a train was more of a hassle. So, he rode to Montgomery and got them both on a train there.

Once Sam got to a township, he found that any place he asked could give him approximate directions to the man he was seeking. Then, when he got close, the neighbors could give him precise directions.

“Parts of the state have seen the rowdies that call themselves ‘Knights of the White Camelia.’ They don’t believe in Negroes voting, and they threaten, lash, and even shoot the men who promote voting,” Sam told a former infantry sergeant in the Army of the Savanah, Brutus Sherman. “The state is organizing a militia to stand against them.”

“Sheriff isn’t enough? Seems to me that breaking the law is their business.”

“Sheriff can deal with one law-breaker; he can get together a posse to deal with a few. When men ride by the fifties to defy the law, we need something else. We didn’t send a sheriff, or even a federal Marshal, against Jeff Davis. That required an army. Against these men, we need an army, too. Just a smaller army”

“And the real army won’t do it?” Sherman asked.

“Not that small. There are 51 counties in this one state. They are talking in Washington about cutting the standing army down to 25,000 men. That might be enough for Alabama, but most of them would be stationed in Indian country. Alabama has to take care of its own problems. Frankly, if the Negro majority government of Alabama can’t take care of Alabama’s problems, then the Democrats will just say that the fault is with having a government which responds to the Negro majority.”

“Well, we haven’t had the problem yet, here. I think I’ll wait until we do.”

Sam had already given up on Sherman. He was ready to pass on. He wasn’t yet ready to abandon an argument, if he ever would be. “Waiting for it to get here,” he said, “will make it ten times worse when it does get here. There are several types supporting these night--riding raids. There are the fire-breathers; there are the ride-alongs; there are the sympathizers. There isn’t much we can do about the fire breather except shoot them, hang them, or put them in the penitentiary. We don’t really do much to the sympathizers; there’s not much we can do, legally. But when the man who is already a sympathizer sees that riding along will make him one of the big boys without much risk, then he will ride along. When he sees that it is dangerous before he joins, then he’ll be too busy for those rides.

“Once he rides once, he is one of a band,” Sam ended. “You might remember how being part of a band of brothers kept you moving forward under fire.”

“Yes, sir! And I’m not going to join another band.”

Sam parted peacefully from Sherman’s house. Mrs. Sherman insisted on feeding him first.

Raz Teal, originally from Tennessee by way of the Army of the Mississippi, had another response altogether.

“I can see that, General. We fight them somewhere sometime, or we go back into slavery. If we fight them sooner and we fight them away from my kids, that’s a good idea.”

Teal went to class two nights a week, mostly with other veterans who had received a little teaching in the army. He would open his place to a meeting of other veterans interested in forming a militia on Saturday afternoon in a little more than a week. They would schedule another meeting later open to all freedmen.

Teal would take responsibility for promoting the militia in his class and to the men in his section, that was ten other grants.

Halfway through this conversation, Sam was a guest for dinner. He got to another fairly-willing former sergeant before the day was done. That man, Jim Bennet, fed him supper and took responsibility for selling the militia to his section. Bennet had a family which included children born before the war. They slept in a loft, and Sam slept in the loft with them that night.

Sam spent another day getting people to spread the word about the militia and the coming meeting Saturday in this township and then he left for the next township on his itinerary. There were not yet two adjacent townships in Calhoun County with schools, and he got the impression that this was true of every county.

When his circuit was finished, he began conducting the meetings of the provisional companies. The first one was at Teal’s place on a Saturday afternoon. They elected the captain from among their members, a man named Rowland; not Teal, to Sam’s surprise. Sam made sure that they were clear that the number of lieutenants, even the legitimacy of the captaincy, required enrolling a sufficient number of privates.

They assigned the responsibility of recruiting members from each section. When there were two in attendance from a section, they chose one to be responsible for the recruitment, when no one had come from a section, they chose one of the spares to recruit in that section. Sam emphasized the necessity of recruiting in the 28 sections bordering on the township (including the corner sections).

“You can’t get to those sections immediately,” he said, “but the county militia has to cover the entire county in a few years. First a company grows, and then it divides. Right now, I’m having trouble persuading the legislature to arm the militia that we have.”

Sam spent the rest of the day and Sunday with the Teal family. He had scheduled the next provisional company meeting for Monday afternoon, the one after that for Tuesday afternoon, etc.

When he finally got back home, he was exhausted. Stepper needed his rest, as well, though Sam had spent more time talking than riding.

There was a letter waiting. Boot had the job, and he was grateful. The letter answered one question. Boot’s hand was almost as pleasant to read as Deb’s, and it was perfectly legible. The second was probably more important for a clerk.

He spent some time catching up with happenings at home. Deb washed his clothes, and he finished reading the book to Tertius. (He had long ago read the whole thing for himself, so he’d know where he was when Tertius got too squirmy after two pages.)

And then it was time to enlarge the Lowndes County militia.

The process for his home county differed mainly in the pitch. Only for two townships was he forming new companies. The other two were close enough to the centers for existing companies that he recruited men for those companies. He invited the captain of each company to join him at the organizing meeting.

And, when he got back from that trip, it was time to prepare for the wedding.

Marjorie Purcell was not a nervous woman. She had come into a state where she had never been before and established a school for a people who had never been to school before among a mass of armed men who took every opportunity to express their hate. She was now facing a marriage, a time when most women are nervous. What she felt was not nervousness.

She felt panic.

Most brides, if they were worried about the particular man they were marrying and the secret rituals of the marriage bed, had seen the open parts of scores of marriages, most immediately their parents’ marriages. Marjorie had seen New England marriages, and she had seen freedman marriages. The marriages of freedmen were quite different, and what would her marriage to Ab be like?

After all, when she had been establishing a school, she had previously taught in the school at Port Royal. She hadn’t ever been a wife, and Ab had never been a husband, and their observations had been of very different marriages. Ab’s enthusiastic report of what he and the general had bought brought that home to her. Ab had not only slept on the floor and washed in the branch while he bought a Sunday suit, He had not thought of a bed or a tub for her until Sam Warren – a man from the rough plains of Illinois by way of four years of military camps – suggested them.

And then, too, it was one bed. Marjorie had never imagined sleeping in a separate bed from her husband. She had quite carefully not imagined what their sleeping arrangements would be. Marjorie was an educated, liberated woman. She knew that marriage involved sex. She also knew that the local whites’ opinion that Negro sex was bestial was the rawest prejudice. Ab? Deferential Ab? Still, the virgin bride’s natural apprehension had that fear -- however often rejected -- added to it.

Marjorie had ventured only a small distance on the road of romance. She had given a few kisses to boys -- as opposed to the scores she had received from relatives. And not one of those kisses had been from Ab. He had called her “Teacher” until she had told him not to. Ab wanted to marry her. Did he feel the least whit romantic towards her?

At least one of these fears, and quite probably both, were silly. Marjorie was clear about that. Still, she found that experiencing a silly fear leaves you afraid.

And she could not get out of it. Engagements were meant to be broken, though she had not known anyone who broke hers. Grooms had been left at the altar. When you agreed to an engagement with a black man, though, your breaking the engagement meant rejecting Black-White marriages. And that was an abandonment of the basic principle of her life, racial equality.