Camellia Warwick, small, delicate, broke through the file with a shriek and ran toward them, her hooped skirt almost lifting her from the ground. Jessica turned back to the lieutenant. “Leave now, young man, and go home to the mother who will never know the grief you’ve caused this boy’s. Stay, and there will be further bloodshed, possibly yours.”
“I make no war against women and servants,” the lieutenant said, “but I aim to take the horses. Signal to your people to stand down, and we will be on our way.”
Silas had been in Dr. Woodward’s office when the tragedy occurred. Afterwards he rode out to Somerset to his favorite vantage point overlooking his plantation and the result of his life’s work. The peace that usually calmed his troubled mind and eased into his soul did not come. He did not hear of the grievous events in the pasture or of his wife’s heroism until he returned home at dusk. There was sadness enough, he thought. He decided to wait until the brunt of Robert’s death had passed to give Jessica the news of Dr. Woodward’s diagnosis.
Chapter Sixty-Five
April twelfth, 1865, would always be remembered in the family annals of the Tolivers, DuMonts, and Warwicks as the day “the boys” came home. The War Between the States was practically over. On April ninth, General Robert E. Lee, commander of Confederate Forces, recognizing its inevitable outcome, had surrendered his 28,000 troops to the Union commander, General Ulysses S. Grant, at Appomattox in Virginia to avoid further casualties and destruction of property in the Southland. Both were staggering. Sam Houston’s words of warning that in case of war, the state would lose “the flower of Texas manhood” applied in devastating numbers to the Texas Confederates who had defended the South. Jake Davis was among them. Late in the war he had split off from Captain Burleson’s unit to join the Texas Brigade that fought in the Eastern Theater under General Lee. It was Jake who sent back word to the Tolivers that Willowshire had been burned to the ground by one of the regiments under the command of U.S. Army general William T. Sherman during his flaming march through South Carolina. Jessica could easily picture the scene of its destruction from the description her brother Michael gave to Jake.
February in Plantation Alley was always a bleak time of year, the color of dusk, and one afternoon, Michael had been startled when one of the servants burst into the library and shouted that the bluecoats were coming. Her brother had stared out his window at a Union colonel on horseback leading a column of blue-coated soldiers at an unhurried gait down the leafless lane of Willowshire to the front of the mansion. Jessica was thankful their parents were not alive to see what happened next. According to Michael’s report to Jake, her brother had gone out to meet the intruders and stood on the verandah while the officer in command dismounted and his men remained in the saddle and fanned out around him.
“Good afternoon,” the officer said to Michael, removing his gloves as he climbed the steps. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Colonel Paul Conklin. Perhaps you remember my aunt.”
Michael admitted he must have blanched white as a cotton boll, for of course he remembered Sarah Conklin.
The colonel allowed him to remove his family, servants, and hunting dogs from the house before the fires were lit, but he ordered everything else to be left behind. Jessica believed that it was for the sake of her friendship with his beloved aunt the soldiers were not permitted to loot the home of her childhood, and for that, she was grateful.
The boys came home on the eve Silas took to his bed, never able to rise from it again. Before then, he had managed to ride out to the plantation every day, see to his business affairs, and attend meetings of the city council, to which he’d been re-elected. Suspecting Silas’s disease from his symptoms, Dr. Woodward had sent him to Houston to a doctor with special knowledge of cancer of the blood. The specialist concurred with Dr. Woodward’s diagnosis: Silas was suffering from a condition known as leukemia. There was no treatment or cure.
Thomas was devastated. No grief he’d experienced in the war could compare to the sorrow of the coming demise of his father. He had returned home for Robert’s funeral in September, and he had noticed how greatly his father had aged. Something had been amiss, but he attributed it to his father’s years of worry that his only child would be counted among the war’s casualties, and the death of Robert had left its mark. His parents, more dear to him than ever, his wife a stranger, suffered deeply for the Warwicks. On that visit to his home, he said to Priscilla, “I want a child, Priscilla, and now. Do you understand?”
She’d nodded, fearful, as usual, but Thomas did not care. For God’s sake, what had the girl expected when she became a wife! That she would simply be set on a shelf and looked at? What use was she if she was no lover, companion, or helpmate and could not bear him children?
She submitted, and Thomas left her wondering where her tender, considerate, understanding husband had gone, but when he returned for good in April, he found her eight months pregnant. He prayed nightly for the safe delivery of his child and that his father might live to see a Toliver of the third generation who would someday become heir to the plantation of Somerset.
“I do not know how I can live without Silas,” Jessica said to Jeremy. They still met around ten o’clock some mornings for a cup of Bess DuMont’s bitter acorn coffee in the gazebo when the laudanum had eased Silas’s pain and allowed him to sleep.
“It isn’t a matter of living,” Jeremy said, his voice throaty with grief. “It’s a matter of staying alive for those left behind.”
He and Henri came every day to cajole with Silas, gossip, bring the latest war news, to assist in his baths, to sit with him when Jessica needed a break. Jeremy read to him as his sight weakened. Henri brought special treats from his store. Their pain behind their jocularity broke Jessica’s heart.
Silas lived three weeks after Priscilla delivered a healthy, nine-pound boy. She asked that her son be named Vernon after an obscure member in the genealogy she’d resurrected to the status of hero on the basis of his participation in the War of the Roses.
“Vernon,” Silas repeated, his voice hoarse from pain and medication as he propped up in bed to hold the baby for the first time. “I like the name. How clever of you, Priscilla. I see the little trooper has your fine ears. Do you mind that the rest of him has your husband’s side of the family to blame?”
“I am thrilled about it,” Priscilla gushed, glancing at Thomas, who stood close to his father on the other side of the bed. Jessica caught the look. It was full of hopeless yearning: I have performed. Now love me. But her husband’s attention was on Silas, obviously impressing on memory his father’s joy as he looked into the face of his grandson.
During his lucid periods, Silas called Thomas to his bedside, and they spent every minute in a huddle over accounting books and business papers and plans for the survival of Somerset. Silas warned that Texas and the South were in for a long period of turmoil. “Our state will be slow to bend its knee to Northern dominance and Texas may not be reinstated into the Union for a long time,” he predicted between moments of losing and regaining his voice. “Lawlessness will be rampant, and the old order of our social structure will be in ruins. Our money will be worthless and land values will drop drastically, but you must not despair, son. Hold on to the land. Better times will come, and Somerset will thrive.”
Unable to bear being beyond the sound of Silas’s voice for as long as it was heard, Jessica sat in the sitting room next to the wall by their bed during these sessions and could hear the exchange of every word. She was torn between telling Silas of her bank account in Boston to ease his worry over money and the risk of his disfavor toward Jeremy when he learned of their pact to keep the money a secret from him.
“Don’t take the risk, Jess,” Jeremy advised during one of their morning interludes in the gazebo. “For my sake, don’t tell him.”
“You believe it would matter at this point that we were in cahoots together?”
“I’m sure it would.”
Jessica hea
rd a strange note in his voice. “Why?”
Jeremy had discovered a loose nail in the swing. He diverted his attention to pushing it back into position with his thumb. “Just trust me, Jess. In some ways I know your husband better than you. He would mind that you took me into your confidence over him and that I acted upon it without his knowledge.”
“As you wish, Jeremy,” Jessica said. “I would do nothing to damage your lifelong friendship, not here at its end.”
Before his death, Silas had been cognizant of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April, the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Georgia in May, news that the possibility of natural gas might replace candles for lighting and wood for cooking, and Jessica’s proud announcement that Maria Mitchell, an advocate in the women’s rights movement, had become the first woman professor of astronomy in the United States when she was appointed to a teaching position at Vassar College in New York. Silas had grinned and said, “What in the world is the world coming to?” and earned an affectionate swipe at his arm from his wife.
The last day of his life, Jessica heard Silas gasp to Thomas, “Son, I’m aware…that your marriage is…not all you’d like it to be, but will you take…a word of advice from your father?”
“I always have, Papa.”
“You may…never grow to…love Priscilla, but you must…respect her love for you. It is not a…trifling thing. It is to be honored. Give her the grace of your…acceptance of it, if…nothing else.…”
Jessica rose to her feet, her hand pressed to her lips. It had been a struggle for Silas to get the words out of his mouth, among the last she believed she would ever hear from her husband. Her fear proved justified. Just as day broke the next morning, she woke from an exhausted sleep to feel Silas press her hand. “Jessica…” he gasped.
She was instantly awake and by his side. “Yes, my love?”
“It…was…” His lips formed a word beginning with w, but it was never uttered.
“Wonderful,” Jessica said. Gently she drew his lids closed and kissed his lips. “Yes, it was, my dearest love.”
Silas died at dawn on June 19, 1865, the day the Union commander of U.S. troops in the state issued the order that the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery was in effect in Texas.
Chapter Sixty-Six
There began a period whose events would not make it into Jessica’s latest diary for over a year. The elegant, red-leather volume of her first recordings had been followed by black-faced utilitarian journals that gave way to commonplace notebooks when they were available. A stack of her musings, impressions, experiences was arranged chronologically on a shelf in her secretary, begun the first months of her marriage to Silas. Her last recording ended in June of 1865. No other entries followed. The final page read:
We have buried Silas. Thomas wished to inter his body at Somerset, at a place only he and Silas knew about. “It overlooks the plantation, Mother, where Papa often went for meditation,” he said to me. “I’d like to visit him there.”
I thought of Joshua, alone in the family plot set aside in the county cemetery where a tombstone in memory of Nanette DuMont is erected and Robert Warwick is buried, but I could not refuse my son his heart’s wish. I did not know of such a place, but then there is so much of Somerset I do not know.
It is truly a beautiful place where my husband lies. A red oak tree shades his grave and a creek flows close by. The wind is gentle there and carries the hum of the spirituals and songs the workers sing in the fields. I suspect Thomas often stops there to confer with his papa. It is a private place just for them, and I feel excluded, but I am glad I did not oppose the choice Silas would have approved. I was his heart, but Somerset was his soul.
Years later Jessica would read “The Bustle in a House,” a poem by Emily Dickinson, that described her activities after Silas’s death and accounted for the long period between her writings. When she finally took pen in hand again, she went back to the blank pages of June of that year and inscribed in her diary the poet’s immortal words:
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth
The sweeping up the heart
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity
Silas lay in the parlor for the last hour of viewing when a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation was put into Thomas’s hands from the telegraph office. The order was backed by the arrival of Union general Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops in Galveston to see that the order was enforced. Thomas read it and, without a word, passed it to the other planters in the room, then he went to his father and pressed a hand to his cold forehead. “It has come, Papa,” he said.
Jessica hoped the memory of the day her son read the proclamation to the slaves never dimmed. From all over the plantation, they gathered for the burial, a sea of black faces, many streaming with tears. The last dirt had been shoveled over Silas’s grave and flowers laid before the headstone. It was a mercifully cool day because of a hilltop breeze and an overcast sun.
“Let there be silence,” Thomas said, raising his hand and lifting his voice to the assembly. “I have something of importance to read to you.”
All tongues ceased and every face turned to fix upon him. He began to recite the contents of General Order No. 3:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
The slaves looked at one another. A ripple of anxiety curled through the gathering. Jasper and his sons had expected the announcement and been alerted to its contents.
“What does this mean?” somebody asked.
“It means youse is free,” Jasper said.
“Mister Thomas ain’t my master no more?”
“He’s your employer if youse stay.”
Most stayed. Thomas availed himself of the contracts the agent at the Freedmen’s Bureau had prepared for former master and slave, and by the end of the month, Somerset had been parceled into fifty-acre units rented to families under a system that came to be known as tenant farming. Once again, a Toliver had led the way in anticipating the inevitable, and the transition for Thomas from master to proprietor and his slaves from bondsmen to paid workers was relatively painless.
But the Toliver family was not without criticism. Most of the planters had not wanted to inform their slaves of their emancipation until the harvest was in, but Thomas’s preemptive disclosure of the freedom act had dashed those hopes. Word spread from cotton field to cotton field, and black workers walked off by the hundreds, leaving their hoes where they dropped them.
“Well, Jessica, you must be happy now,” Lorimer Davis said.
“You would assume that so shortly after Silas’s death?” Jessica said.
“You know perfectly well I’m talking about the abolishment of slavery.”
“I am always happy when justice is done,” Jessica said.
Lorimer’s slaves had left his cotton to dry unpicked in the fields, and no promise of better treatment had lured them back. Without sufficient manpower, the Davis plantation, like many others in the region, stood on the verge of financial ruin.
General Granger’s troops were followed by fifty thousand more that surged into Texas to occupy towns in accordance with the martial law policy imposed by the U.S. Congress upon the “conquered provinces” of the Confederacy. Union occupation was the first phase of a period congressional leaders had officially termed “Reco
nstruction.” Federal officers were to replace civil authorities, protect the freed blacks from oppression, and ensure the safety of the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a relief organization set up by the U.S. government to help former slaves adjust to freedom. The citizens of Howbutker, furious at the insult when hometown blood had been spilled to defend Texas borders successfully against invasion, held their collective breath over what occupation would mean.
One afternoon in early July as Houston Avenue snoozed in the heat of high summer, a clatter of horses’ hooves striking the brick street broke the somnolent silence. Jessica was upstairs at the heart-rending task of storing away Silas’s clothes in a cotton sack when she heard the commotion. Except for the servants, she was alone in the house. Thomas, as usual, was at the plantation, and her daughter-in-law had taken Vernon to see his other grandmother. Jessica paused in the folding of Silas’s shirt. She knew at once that the feared occupation force had arrived. Word had gone before their advance that they were on the way. Citizens had hidden their valuables when they heard reports from communities already occupied that private homes were being used to quarter the men, and speculation was rampant that the Yankees would bivouac on Houston Avenue and its officers commandeer the mansions.
Within minutes, there was a scurry of feet up the stairs as the doorbell reverberated throughout the house. The door flew open. Petunia had not bothered to knock. “Miss Jessica,” she said, out of breath, “they’s some Union soldiers on the porch.”
Calmly, Jessica finished folding Silas’s shirt. “Very good, Petunia, I’ll go see what they’re about.”
She could not calm the accelerated beat of her heart as she descended the stairs. There had come reports of incidences of vicious abuse by the occupation troops. In Gonzales, a group of Union soldiers had taken offense at a doctor’s comment and dragged him from his office by his feet, then shot and killed him in the street. Homes and stores had been ransacked, personal treasures stolen, property damaged, and liberties taken with women. Jessica had months ago stored away a pistol in the bottom drawer of her wardrobe.