Reuben nudged him: ‘Wonderful machine, eh? How simple. How difficult it was to work cotton before it came along.’ Rather ruefully he added: ‘You know, Sett, we Southerners dreamed about a gin like this for a hundred years. Even worked on crude designs now and then. A damned schoolteacher from Massachusetts comes down here on vacation or something, studies the problem one week, and produces this.’ With profound admiration he watched the gin as it ceaselessly picked the fiber from the seed; as long as the boys below kept the horses walking, and the central pole turning on its axis, so long would the miraculous gin do in an hour what a thousand nimble fingers in Virginia once took a month to complete.
‘This gin ensures the South’s domination,’ Reuben said, almost gloatingly. ‘The world needs clothing, and it can’t afford wool.’ Grabbing a handful of lint, he apostrophized it: ‘Get along to Galveston, and then to the mills in Lancashire, then as a bolt of cloth on some freighter headed for Australia. The world has to have what you provide, and if the North ever tried to interrupt our cotton trade, all the armies and navies of Europe would spring to our defense.’ Patting the gin, he said: ‘You are our shield in battle.’
Then he laughed: ‘How ironical history can be, Sett. Maybe the greatest invention of mankind, certainly of our South, and the genius who made it earned not a penny.’
‘I didn’t know that. Of course, gins aren’t that important to Sea Island.’
‘Whitney lost his patent. Never really got it, because the gin was so vital that everyone moved in and simply copied it. Lawyers, you know.’
As Reuben said these words, his cousin noted that he was looking at the gin strangely, as if trying to remember each element of its movement so that it could be duplicated in Texas, but this seemed odd, because a good commercial gin could be bought from many sources for less than a hundred dollars. Powered by one of the new steam engines, it might cost a hundred and a half, so that any important cotton plantation could afford its own.
For five days the citizens of Social Circle entertained the emigrants in one big mansion after another, until Millicent cried at one dinner: ‘You have certainly proved your right to your name. This is the socialest circle I’ve ever been in,’ and a banker responded with an apt toast: ‘To the Cobbs, the first group ever to leave Georgia for Texas without the sheriff chasing them.’
On the morning of Thursday, November first, the Georgia Cobbs moved their wagons into line, and as they did so, Millicent, to her amazement, counted thirty-eight. ‘Good heavens, Prue, are you taking everything you own?’ she asked, and Prue replied: ‘Yes.’ So the caravan was formed: Edisto wagons, nineteen, Georgia, thirty-eight; Edisto slaves, thirty-two, Georgia, forty-nine; Edisto whites, four, Georgia, five; plus one Bible from Edisto and certain remarkable items from Georgia.
On Friday, Sett discovered how remarkable the items were, for when one of the wagons mired in the mud, he saw that it contained the metal parts of the disassembled gin which he had been studying only a few days before. He recognized the splashes of yellow color and especially the saw mechanism, which carried in iron letters the name of the manufacturer. Reuben Cobb, on that last night when the banker was extolling his honesty, had been busy stealing one of the town’s two gins.
‘Oh, it belongs to me, you might say,’ he explained. ‘It’s a Cobb gin, that’s for sure, but it belonged to the other Cobbs. They owed me a lot, and they can get another.’ However, Sett noticed that despite his bravado, Reuben followed a most circuitous route around Atlanta, keeping a rear lookout posted in case sheriffs tried to recover the gin.
Once when the lead wagon was well and truly mired in the mud of Mississippi, the Edisto Cobbs caught a glimpse of their cousin’s darker nature, for after minutes of bellowing at Jaxifer to get the wagon moving, Reuben lost his temper and thrashed the struggling slave with a whip he kept at hand. Seventeen, eighteen times he lashed the big, silent man across the back, and it would have been difficult to guess who was the more appalled by this performance, the Edisto whites or the Edisto blacks, for during his entire stewardship of the island plantation Sett Cobb had never whipped a slave. He had disciplined them and occasionally he threw them into the plantation jail, but never had he whipped one, nor had he allowed his overseers to do so.
Although the whites and blacks may have been equally appalled, it was the latter who suffered in a unique way. You could see it in the way Trajan cringed when the strokes of the whip fell; you could hear it in the gasps of the Edisto women, for this incident in the swamps of Mississippi demonstrated what slavery really meant: when one slave was whipped, all slaves were whipped.
When Trajan, quivering with outrage, sought to move forward to aid Jaxifer, Sett reached out a restraining hand, and without words having been said, Trajan knew that his master was promising: ‘We Edisto people will never do it that way.’
It was an ironclad rule of the cotton states, broken only by fools, that one white master never reproved another in the presence of slaves, and Somerset Cobb was especially attentive to this rule, so that when the thrashing ended he felt ashamed of himself for having revealed his feelings to his slave Trajan, and he attempted to assuage his conscience by going quietly to Reuben that evening and saying: ‘You were having a hard time with Jaxifer. That wagon was really mired.’
‘Sometimes boys like Jaxifer require attention.’
‘They really do, Reuben, they really do.’ Then he added, almost offhandedly: ‘At Edisto we never whipped our niggers.’ And he said this with such calm force that Reuben knew that whereas he might beat his own slaves, he must never touch Sett’s.
A genteel Southern family traveling anywhere seemed always to have waiting in the next town a cousin or business associate who had left the Carolinas or Georgia some time back. In Vicksburg, that important town guarding the Mississippi River, the Cobbs visited a delightful pair of spinsters, the Misses Peel, whose parents had left Charleston some forty years earlier to acquire a large plantation bordering the river.
The sisters, unable to find in Vicksburg any suitors of a breeding acceptable to the elder Peels, had languished, as they said amusingly, ‘in unwed-ded bliss.’ They were charming ladies, alert, witty and given to naughty observations about their neighbors.
Their gracious home was located on a bluff at the north end of Cherry Street, and so situated that it overlooked the great dark river below. ‘The Mississippi isn’t the first water you see,’ one of the Misses Peel explained. ‘That’s the Yazoo Diversion. It’s a canal that makes our town a riverport. But beyond, out there in the darkness … when there’s a full moon the Mississippi glows like a long chain of pearls.’
‘It’s good of you to entertain us so lavishly,’ Petty Prue exclaimed, ‘because when we leave Vicksburg we separate.’
‘Oh, dear! You’re not parting?’
‘Only temporarily. Somerset and Millicent, they’re taking a riverboat down to New Orleans and then up the Red River. To make all the arrangements in Texas before Reuben and I get the wagons there overland.’
One of the Peels said with great enthusiasm: ‘Millicent, you and Somerset don’t have to sail all the way to New Orleans. Twice when I’ve gone, our big boat has stopped in the middle of the Mississippi while a small boat came out from the Red to take passengers from us. How romantic, I thought, changing ships in midocean, as it were. How I wanted to quit my cabin and join that small boat to see where it might carry me.’
‘But, Lissa, you wouldn’t want to miss New Orleans,’ Petty Prue cried in her high, lyrical voice. ‘All those shops.’
‘I have little taste for shopping,’ Millicent said. ‘I’m impatient to reach our new home.’
The Peels now turned to Petty Prue: ‘Surely, you’re not going to ride those rough wagons across Arkansas when you could sail to Texas in a big riverboat!’ But the saucy little Georgian snapped: ‘I ride with my husband. Where he goes, I go.’ Miss Peel said: ‘But the boat would be so comfortable,’ and Prue replied: ‘After three months of wagon
s, my backside’s made of leather.’ And she helped supervise the loading of the wagons Reuben would be taking, placing them just so on the rickety ferries which would carry them across the Mississippi to start them on their way to Texas. She waved goodbye to the Edisto Cobbs: ‘We’ll overtake you about the first of February. Have our lands selected, because Reuben will want to plant his cotton.’
And so the two families separated, one leading a slow caravan crosscountry to Texas, the other going by swift riverboat down the Mississippi to a romantic halting place in midriver, where a much smaller steamer waited to receive passengers bound for the Red River. When heavy planks were swung to join the two vessels, the four Cobbs, seven of their slaves, two disassembled wagons and six horses were transferred. Then, as whistles blew, the emigrants started one of the more surprising journeys of their lives.
The Red River ship was small; it smelled of cows and horses, and the food was markedly less palatable than that on the larger boat. But the river itself, and the land bordering it, was fascinating, a true frontier wilderness with just enough settlement scattered haphazardly to maintain interest. The Cobb children were delighted by the closeness of the banks and the variation in the plantations. ‘These aren’t plantations,’ their mother said with equal interest in the new land. ‘These are farms. White people work here.’ She was seeing a new vision of America, one she had not known existed, and she was impressed by its sense of latent power.
‘Will we have a farm like these?’ the children asked, and she laughed: ‘For a year, maybe, yes. But at the end of two years we’ll have a plantation just like Edisto. Cousin Reuben will see to that.’
Near Shreveport the Cobbs made their acquaintance with one of the marvels of America, as explained by two red-faced men who were conveying a passel of slaves for public auction in Texas: ‘Dead ahead, blockin’ things tighter’n a drum, what we call the Great Red River Raft.’
‘What could that be?’ Somerset asked, and with obvious delight the two men told of this natural miracle: ‘First noted by white men in 1805, and what they saw fairly amazed them. Centuries past, huge trees, uprooted by storms, floated downstream and were trapped by bends in our sluggish river.’
The second slaver broke in: ‘Happens in all rivers, but in the Red the trees carried so much soil in their matted roots, they provided choice growin’ ground for weeds and bushes and even small trees.’
‘Like he says, more big fallen trees trapped in the river meant more small trees growin’ in the mud. There! Look ahead! A whole river shut down.’
And when the Cobbs looked where he pointed, they saw a major river, one capable of carrying big steamboats, closed off by this impenetrable mass of tree and root and tangle and lovely blooming flowers. ‘How far does it reach?’ Cobb asked, and the answer astounded him: ‘Ah-ha! That first report in 1805 said: “We got a Raft out here eighty miles long. In places, maybe twenty miles wide.” So officials in Washington said: “Break it loose,” and they tried, for it converted maybe a million acres of good farmland into swamp.’
‘Why couldn’t they break it up?’ Somerset asked, and the men cried gleefully, each trying to convey the story: ‘They tried. Army come in here and tried. But for each foot they knock off down here, the Raft grows ten feet up there. Last survey? One hundred and twenty miles long, packed solid, no boat can move.’
‘Then why have we come here?’ Cobb asked, and the men gave a startling reply: ‘Miracles! Bring your children up here and they’ll see miracles.’
So the four Cobbs stood beside the slavers as their steamboat headed right for the Red River Raft, and when it seemed that the boat would crash, it veered off to the left to enter a bewildering sequence of twists, turns, openings and sudden vistas of the most enchanting beauty. The boat was picking its way through a jungle fairyland stretching miles in every direction.
The slavers seemed to take as much delight in this mysterious passage as did the Cobbs: ‘Nothing’ anywhere like it! The Raft backs up so much water that these private little rivers run through the forest. But the best is still ahead.’
They were correct, for as they emerged from the watery forest, a grand lake, mysterious and dark, opened up. ‘It’s called Caddo,’ the men said. ‘After a tribe of Indians that once lived along its shores.’ The lake had a thousand arms twisting and writhing inland, a hundred sudden turns which allowed the boat to keep moving forward when passage seemed blocked. The live oaks that lined this vast swamp especially pleased the older Cobbs, because from all the lower branches hung matted clumps of Spanish moss; Caddo Lake was virtually identical with the swamps of Edisto, and when they consulted a map they saw that the two locations, so far apart, were on almost the same latitude, about 32° 30’.
After intricate maneuvering, the steamer broke out of Caddo Lake, and on 24 January 1850, entered a small cypress-lined creek and blew its whistle as it steamed into the wharf at Jefferson, Texas: population 1,300; distance from Edisto, 997 miles.
When Somerset and Trajan met Reuben Cobb and his wagons a week later in Shreveport, they had exciting news, and Trajan told the other slaves: ‘Land almost de same. First class fo’ cotton. Carpenters already buildin’ us homes.’
Somerset was more specific: ‘Reuben, you led us to a treasure,’ but before he could say more, his cousin interrupted: ‘Sett, I want to talk with you and your boy Trajan,’ and Somerset was perplexed, because he could not imagine what might have happened which would involve both him and his slave.
Reuben’s words were grave: ‘First day west of Vicksburg we come upon this man, his slaves in bad shape. He was in bad shape too, damn him. Begged me to lend him one of our slaves to drive his wagon for the rest of that day. Out of the goodness of my heart, I loaned him Hadrian.’
‘Where is my boy?’ Trajan cried.
‘Gone. The son-of-a-bitch stole him. It was a trick.’
‘Gone?’ Trajan wailed.
‘Yep, stole clean away. But we propose to get him back.’ He suggested that he, Jaxifer, Trajan and Somerset mount their horses, arm themselves and fan out to catch that swine, so for two days the Cobbs searched the countryside, looking for the kidnapper, questioning everyone they met.
Somerset had never seen his cousin so furious: ‘Damnit, Sett, to steal a boy like that. To take a boy that age away from his father. Trajan, if we catch him …’
They did not find him, then or ever. When it was clear that they were not going to recover this promising boy worth three hundred dollars, Reuben Cobb’s fury increased, and on the night they abandoned the chase both brothers spoke with Trajan. Somerset said, tears moistening his eyes: ‘As long as I live, Traje, I’ll search for your son. I’ll find him for you. I’ll find him.’ Reuben, clasping the slave by the shoulder, said: ‘We got ourselves an orphaned boy, good lad I believe. Not your son’s age, but would you consent to care for him? I’d pay you a little somethin’.’ But the boy himself, Trajan’s son, was never found.
The putting together of the Cobb plantation at Jefferson became an act of high comedy, because whereas Somerset in his first days had found some three thousand acres exactly to his liking, it was settled land with a good portion of the fields already cleared, and it was priced at three dollars and seventy-five cents an acre, which Reuben believed to be excessive. The land lay just south of town and belonged to an enterprising Scotsman named Buchanan, who had accepted four hundred dollars as down payment on the deal.
Reuben, assured that he could find better land for much less, roared into the home of the astonished Buchanan like a wayward tornado, demanding a refund of the four hundred dollars on grounds that the Scotsman was a thief, a perjurer and a scoundrel who had viciously misrepresented both the land and its value. When the startled Scotsman said there was no chance that he would return the money, Reuben warned him that he, Reuben, was a practiced attorney from Georgia, well versed in land law, and that if Buchanan did not hand over the deposit immediately, he was going to find himself in a court of law charged with even wors
e offenses than those so far enumerated.
The four hundred dollars was returned, whereupon Reuben directed the workmen who had been building the slave shacks on the Buchanan land to tear them down and save the lumber. When asked where the shacks were to be built, Reuben said: ‘I’ll tell you in three days.’
He now became tireless, rising before dawn in the tiny rooms the family had rented in the home of a Baptist minister, riding back and forth along all the dusty roads so far opened and looking at fields near and distant which might be for sale. At the end of four days he had settled upon three thousand acres a few miles east of town and situated nicely on the north bank of the stream which connected Lake Caddo with Jefferson. The land was owned by a widow who felt that she could not handle it by herself, now that her husband was dead, but realizing that it was favorable land, she wanted three dollars an acre, which again Reuben still considered excessive.
He therefore paid ardent court to the widow, explaining that the best thing for her to do was sell the land, which would require an enormous amount of effort to clear, and hie herself to New Orleans, where she could live in comfort for the rest of her days. When she replied that she had never been in New Orleans and knew nobody there, Reuben assured her: ‘I know people of excellent reputation. The day you sell I’ll put you on the steamer with your money and letters of introduction, and you’ll thank the day you met me.’
When Somerset heard of the negotiations, he said flatly: ‘I’ll not cheat a widow,’ and since he liked the new land very much, acknowledging that Reuben had found better than the first lot, he wanted to pay the asked-for three dollars. But this Reuben would not permit.