Lincoln Goes to Kansas
John Brown has shown great courage, rare unselfishness . . . But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime.
—Abraham Lincoln, December 1859
As Brown is being hanged, Lincoln is traveling to Kansas, braving the weather and the uncertain roads. This is much appreciated, all the more so since the audiences are small and hardly worth the effort. Few politicians come to Kansas in December. Fewer have Lincoln’s national profile.
So the Republicans there are gratified, but also firmly Seward’s people, their own feelings about slavery radicalized by the boil of terrorism and murder in which they’ve been living. They see no reason to switch to Lincoln, much as they like him. Despite this, Lincoln’s chances for nomination have materially improved and their own John Brown is responsible.
In the shock of the insurrection, Seward is suddenly too extreme. Every effort must be made to disassociate the Republican Party from Harpers Ferry. John Brown, it is said, has killed the Seward presidency dead.
If Seward is too radical for the conservatives, Bates is too conservative for the radicals. What’s needed now is a moderate. What’s needed now is Lincoln.
* * *
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Lincoln’s private opinion is that Brown, while right in his beliefs, was wrong in his actions.
* * *
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Lincoln’s private opinion is that Brown was insane and those slaves who did not come to his side when called were not.
* * *
xvi
The following winter is severe. Snow drifts against the front door during the night and Sleeper has to push with his shoulder to crack the seal of ice in the morning. One morning he can’t do it, and has to leave through the kitchen, where the stove has already warmed things up. Rosalie, going out for groceries, takes a bad fall and is helped home by two men, each so drunk at ten in the morning as to make it unclear who is holding up whom. Rosalie mentions several times the fact that, in Baltimore, the grocery was right next door—it was a matter of a minute to fetch the eggs and bread no matter what the weather. If this is intended to irritate Asia, it works. They have servants to go for the groceries. There was no need for Rosalie to leave the house.
Asia hasn’t been outside for weeks. The air is an arctic blast in the lungs. The ground is too icy—if she fell she would never get up again. She would lie there like a turtle on its shell. And yet, inside the house, she sweats at night, the baby burning in her belly. She takes off her clothes and stands before the bedroom mirror. She can make out the shape of a foot, kicking out against her stretched skin. A dark line extends up from her navel. Shiny streaks of skin fan over her hips. Her nausea has never completely gone away and the only thing she can eat with any pleasure is flavored ice.
The Philadelphia house is larger than the one on Exeter Street, but it’s also older and darker. Sleeper has promised Asia a better house after the baby comes, something out in the country where a child can run. In the meantime, Asia spends much of her time in the only room downstairs that gets full sunlight in the morning. She lowers herself onto the sofa. It doesn’t seem possible that her stomach could swell so much without bursting.
She’s there, with a book she isn’t reading in her hand, listening to the fire eat itself in the fireplace when, for no obvious reason, she thinks of Hattie and is overwhelmed with dread. She rises and hoists herself up the stairs to the nursery. The preparation of blankets and toys and tiny clothes is something Asia would have expected to enjoy, but she’s left it mostly to Mother. In truth, she’s hardly been in this room. She pauses in the doorway, because Rosalie is already there, sitting in the window where the light is best, doing the uninspired but necessary sewing that a great many diapers require.
Rosalie looks up at Asia. “We’ll be ready when the baby comes,” she says and then she looks at Asia again. “Are you feeling all right?”
Since Asia first learned she was pregnant, she’s had many moments of joy and anticipation. She’s always loved babies. Won’t it be wonderful to have one of her very own? She pictures herself kissing a round knee, singing a lullaby, sleeping in a chair with the baby breathing softly against her shoulder. But her dreams have turned strange—birds underwater and fish in the air—and she startles awake several times a night gasping for breath. Sometimes these bouts of panic spread into the daylight and then keep on spreading, like a shadow that eventually consumes the figure that cast it.
She looks now at Rosalie, whose crooked back probably means she could never carry a child and anyway she’s too old and anyway who on earth would the father be? Asia wishes she were Rosalie now, crooked back and sad future and all. She’s always had such a calling to the convent. Goddamn Edwin anyway for making her marry.
Asia drops into the rocking chair and starts to rock. The wooden floor creaks beneath her. Outside the sky is a pale, grim gray. “Are you all right?” Rosalie asks again and Asia stops rocking by putting her feet down hard.
“I’m afraid I’ll die,” she says and then, realizing that her voice was so soft, Rosalie can’t possibly have heard, she says it louder. “I’m afraid I’m going to die. Don’t tell Mother.”
Two months back, she’d made a study of the gravestones in Father’s cemetery. She’d been methodical, one section at a time. Of course, not every woman who dies in her twenties or thirties dies in childbirth. Her mind is full of angels with frozen wings.
“I don’t want to die,” she says. She’s weeping now, which she didn’t expect, and it makes her cross. She was right to think this shouldn’t be said aloud. Now it sits in the chair beside her, now it starts the chair rocking again, now it has her by the throat.
She certainly hadn’t planned on telling Rosalie, but, here, she’s done it and really whom else could she have told? Not the boys—it would be almost cruel how ill-equipped they’d be. Not Jean, because she still wants Jean to envy her married state and join her in it. She needs the company.
Not Mother, who is surely suffering these same fears, as any mother would. Mother made John promise not to go to war because she couldn’t bear to lose him. Why didn’t she make Asia promise not to marry? Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung? Asia would go to war in a minute. She’d come home with medals.