CHAPTER XLV
The forty million Africans who had been raped from the Dark Continent and distributed among the Christian nations at so much per head, had made little active resistance to being swallowed, but had proved hard to digest. The missionary movements just begun had made little progress in Africa and some thought it an advantage to bring the Africans to the country where they could have the benefits of training in the true religion. But this training had a little too much to do with an education in the arts of bloodhounds, in the vigor of overseers’ whips and in the dramatic experiences of the auction block.
This transplanted race threw off such myriads of mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons that the situation had social complications: involving the future life as well as this. While most of the Americans were undoubtedly going to hell, those who were going to heaven were not comfortable at the prospect of flying around with black saints whose haloes might get caught in their kinky hair. People were saying that America “could not exist half black and half white”; some doubted if even heaven could exist half black and half white.
The pestiferous abolitionists had survived mobs, courts, and the horror of being unfashionable. Even the churches could not keep infidels in their congregations from questioning the manifest will of God, who in Mosaic law had imposed and regulated slavery, and in the New Testament had commanded the return of a runaway slave. Numerous individual clergymen had taken a conspicuous part in this form of sacrilege, but the great majority were true to their creeds, and denounced the heretics. The Methodist and other churches in official assemblies repeatedly disciplined their anarchic parsons and forbade the attempt to stir up useless hostility by advocating “emancipation.” But the trouble-mongers would not be quieted. In spite of the efforts of the respectables, there was, as one New York writer put it, a “lamentable squandering of vast sums of money in an improbable and visionary crusade, which might have conferred inestimable benefits had they not been diverted from the legitimate channels of Christian benevolence.”
And now the outrageous disturbers had split the nation. Mayor Fernando Wood, having failed to secede from the state, proposed that New York City should secede from the Union. He was not heeded. Indeed a number of prominent citizens held a meeting in Pine Street and passed resolutions pleading with Mr. Jefferson Davis and the Southern governors to return to the fold. RoBards was one of the signers of this appeal.
To him and to others the great house of the republic could not be divided. It was a pity to let a herd of ignorant blacks disrupt the sacred compact. Numberless New Yorkers detested the abolitionists as heartily as the Southerners did.
But the younger, hotter blood of the North demanded action. They did not care much for the niggers, but they hated the secessionists. Keith terrified Patty by his belligerent tone. He wanted to set out at once and trample Richmond and Atlanta and Charleston into submission.
Strangely, very strangely, his martial humor brought on a sudden amatory fever, and awoke a sudden interest in a certain young woman of an old and wealthy family: Frances Ward, a relative of the banker Ward who had moved into Bond Street when it began to rival St. John’s Park as a select region.
At first Patty had been glad to have Keith seen about with the girl. Patty had a wholesome and normal amount of snobbery in her nature, and it pleased her to tell of the great people she had known, especially the Ward sisters. They had been called “The Three Graces of Bond Street,” until Julia had terrified everybody by going in for learning to an almost indecent extent. Six years younger than Patty, she had, at the age of seventeen, published a review and a translation of a French book, reviewed German translations, and finally married an outright philanthropist, Dr. Howe. She had become an abolitionist and assistant editor of an anti-slavery paper! Not to mention her activities as a mother, a poetess, the author of a play produced at Wallack’s, and recently of a book on Cuba, which was forbidden circulation in that island.
Still, much is forgiven to a banker’s daughter, and Patty encouraged Keith to cultivate the relative of Julia Ward Howe. Frances took the place of the aqueduct in Keith’s affections and Patty called her “the Nymph Crotona” in proud ridicule. Every evening when Keith was not at the Seventh Regiment in its armory over Tompkins market, he was at the home of Miss Ward, or out with her in one of the great sleighs that thrilled Broadway with tintinnabulation.