Chesapeake (110 page)

At the bottom of the pro-slavery men were the professional trackers like Lafe Turlock with his dogs and Herman Cline with his rawhide.
They hated blacks. There were not many like these two, but every town on the Eastern Shore provided its quota. One of the easiest recreations to organize along the salty rivers was a nigger chase.

In between stood the majority, a group difficult to decipher. They were white; they owned little land or other forms of wealth; few had slaves, and then only one or two. But they had been convinced by southern philosophers that their welfare depended upon the perpetuation of slavery, and they took it unkindly when folks at the North spoke ill of their peculiar institution. They were motivated not by a fear of slaves but by their dislike of freed blacks, whom they saw as shiftless, undisciplined and profligate. One farmer spoke for all when he said, ‘With a slave who knows his place I got no quarrel, but I cannot abide a freed nigger who can read. He means trouble.’

This middle group was shocked when people actually living in the South, like the Paxmores, spoke against slavery and rejoiced when blacks escaped. These people did not hire themselves out as slave-catchers, but if a chase developed, they joined, and when the slave was treed and the dogs were barking, they derived as much enjoyment as when a raccoon was trapped. But if anyone suggested that the Eastern Shore might have to quit the Union in defense of slavery, these men and women grew reflective and said, ‘We stand with Daniel Webster. The Union must be preserved.’

In the 1850s, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act under the sponsorship of Senators Clay and Webster—Calhoun felt it was not stringent enough—a subtle, undeclared war erupted between the slaveowners and the enemies of the peculiar institution. It was fought incessantly; a slave would run away from some plantation in South Dorchester, make his way to the Choptank, know from secret instructions where the Paxmores lived, and at dead of night cross the broad river, go ashore at the foot of the white cliffs showing gray in the moonlight, and climb to the kitchen door.

In later years white men and women would often ask incredulously: Why did the blacks accept slavery? In the decade from 1851 to the end of 1860, some two thousand made their way up the Eastern Shore, fighting against incalculable odds, trying to beat their way to freedom. An old woman in her seventies would say some morning. ‘I gonna die free.’ And off she would go. Children would be told in awesome tones, ‘You make one sound, we all gonna be killed.’ They died in swamps; they drowned in rivers; they were hanged from trees; they were burned at stakes. But on they came, and some stopped briefly at the Paxmores’.

For the second time in history a Turlock was learning to read. Young Jake, eleven years old, was getting up each morning, washing his face at the bench behind the cabin at the edge of town, and trooping off to
school. The existence of this academy, and especially the presence of its remarkable teacher, was one of those accidents which alter the face of history—not big history, like wars and elections, but the little history of a town like Patamoke or a river like the Choptank.

Paul Steed had become more and more a man of powerful character, and despite the infuriating indifference of the federal government, he persisted in believing that a railroad could be built down the spine of the peninsula, but he wondered how, when the work began, the construction companies would find enough skilled labor to build the tracks. Slaves with mules could do the grading, but it would require a lot more than slaves to do the actual building.

His problem was solved when the Baltimore newspapers began running stories about the famine in Ireland and of the forced exodus from that starving land. One night in his study he told Susan, ‘Damn! We could sail to Ireland and pick up a thousand men!’ He became so excited by the prospect that he could not sleep. After they retired, she heard him roaming up and down all night, talking to himself.

In the morning he boarded one of his ships loading wheat, ordered the captain to be ready to sail at noon, regardless of cargo, and by nightfall was at the mouth of the Chesapeake, having left behind orders that huts be erected in Patamoke to receive the immigrants he would import.

When he landed at Cork he saw a sight which would haunt him for the rest of his days: lines of families near death from starvation waiting hopelessly for food, or transportation to anywhere. ‘They’d sail to the ports of hell,’ the English dockmaster told Steed.

‘I could find places for three hundred men.’

‘Must take families.’

‘I didn’t want women and children.’

‘Nobody does, but if you leave them behind, they die.’

So Paul stood at the foot of the gangplank and watched as seventy-seven families came past him, glassy-eyed and with an appalling number of emaciated children. He tried to choose families with grown sons, but the dockmaster did not allow much selection, and in the end Steed had a conglomerate mix of some men who might possibly build a railroad and many dependents who might possibly survive on what their fathers were able to earn.

‘Home fast!’ Steed told his captain, and when the ship had weighed anchor he started his duties as head feeder of the starving. He worked in the kitchens twelve and fifteen hours a day, helping to prepare food and devising ways of doling it out in proper portions so that no one gorged himself to death. His limp and his twisted neck became the Irishmen’s symbol of salvation, and when Sunday came, he organized prayer services for the three hundred and seven Catholics he was importing to his homeland.

There was no priest aboard, and Steed was reluctant to lead devotions, but he did find a glib-tongued spindle of a man named Michael Caveny to whom praying was as natural as cursing:

On and on he prayed, a mellifluous outpouring of imagery and biblical fragments, so filled with hope that Steed could hear sobs from every part of the crowded deck. At the peroration, in which God and babies and lambs and feasts of thanksgiving intermingled, Paul found himself wiping his eyes, and that day released double portions of food.

Michael Caveny—his name had originally been Cavanaugh, but centuries of abbreviation had shortened it to its present musical form—was an uncommon man. At thirty-nine, with three children, he had known the torment of hunger but never despair. He had done things to feed his children which in later years he would erase from memory, not wishing to saddle his family with such images, and he had forced them to survive in conditions which had exterminated scores of his neighbors.

He was a lyrical man to whom the slightest manifestation of nature became justification for protracted prose poems: ‘Look at the fish flying through the air! God sends them aloft with a song, and the Devil pulls them back into his hot frying pan.’ The more Steed saw of this man the more he liked him, and by the time the ship reached Patamoke, Michael Caveny had been designated foreman of the railroad crew.

This proved an empty honor, for there was no railroad. The nation was too preoccupied with building really important lines to the West to allocate any funds for an inconsequential line down the Delmarva Peninsula, as it had been aptly named from the first syllables of the three states which shared it. The railroad did not reach Chicago until 1853, and it had to probe south, too, for despite the apprehension of Senator Calhoun that it might bring northern heresy with it, merchants of the South insisted that they, too, have iron tracks on which to move their goods. So once again the Eastern Shore was ignored. But this was not all loss, for in the resulting isolation, it was able to confirm and deepen its unique patterns of life.

The decision not to build left Paul Steed with his horde of unemployed Irish Catholics crowded into a block of hovels along the northern edge of town. They had no priest, no occupation, no savings, and only such
clothing as the plantation owners in the area could provide, but within weeks it was astonishing how many of them found jobs. Eleven left town to become overseers; they became famous for two characteristics: they kept an eye out for the prettiest slave girls, and periodically they went on titanic drunks, but they were basically good men, and when they were fired from one plantation they quickly found jobs on another—‘McFee swears he’ll stay sober this time, and I think we ought to give him a chance.’

Paul Steed, of course, offered Michael Caveny a good job at Devon, but to his surprise, the doughty little Irishman refused. ‘I have a feeling, Mr. Steed, that St. Matthew himself would be honored to work for you, but my place is in town, with my people. We’ve to build a church and find ourselves a priest, and I’ve the little ones to think about.’

‘You’ve already done wonders with them.’

‘Ah, truer words were never spoken, Mr. Steed, but now I’m pondering their education. Patamoke school needs a teacher and I’m of a mind to apply.’ Steed warned him that local Methodists might be reluctant to hire a Catholic, but Caveny said sweetly, ‘True as the word of God, but I’m sure you’ll be giving me a fine recommendation.’ And that was how young Jake Turlock awoke one morning with orders to report to Teacher Caveny.

‘If’n them Papist kids kin learn to read,’ his Grandfather Lafe said, ‘so kin you.’

The instruction which Jake would remember longest came not in reading but in geography. Mr. Caveny had acquired fifteen copies of a splendid little book called
A Modern Geography,
published in New York City in 1835. It had been compiled by a Professor Olney, M.A., and it summarized the latest information on the world, with engaging woodcuts illustrating how a tiger eats a man in India or malamutes haul sledges in Siberia.

The most valuable contribution appeared on the last page of each section, in a paragraph captioned
Character,
for here, in a few solid words, Professor Olney told the students what they might expect of the inhabitants of each country. Professor Olney, himself of British extraction, reminded the students of what their ancestors had been like:

Jake recognized that these favorable terms described the people he knew in Patamoke, and when he recited the descriptions to his grandfather,
Lafe growled, ‘That professor knows what he’s talkin’ about.’ However, when Olney had to deal with non-British peoples, especially those with Catholic backgrounds, he was more severe:

Jake saw nothing in these descriptions to complain of. Certainly, the Irish living on the north edge of town were passionate, ignorant and hospitable, but Mr. Caveny took a different view. ‘I want each boy to take his pen and line out the words after
Irish,
because the writer knew very little of his subject. Write in “Witty, devout, generous to a fault, quick of mind, faithful to the death. But violent-tempered, especially when mistreated by the English.”’ For the Italians and the Spaniards, no corrections were needed. But it was when Olney reached the lesser breeds that he really unloosed his venom:

Mr. Caveny required his students to memorize these perceptive summaries, and in each examination he would pose some question like this: ‘Compare an Englishman with a Siberian.’ And Jake would respond, ‘Englishmen are brave, intelligent, industrious and generous, but Siberians are ignorant, filthy and barbarous.’ He had never seen a Siberian, of course, but he felt certain that he would recognize one if he ever got to Siberia. They rode in sledges pulled by dogs.

In his book Professor Olney did not characterize Negroes who lived in America, but of those who remained in Africa he said succinctly, ‘An ignorant, filthy and stupid people.’ Mr. Caveny said, ‘While that description is certainly true of Africa, it would be desirable for us to construct our own description of the Negroes here in Patamoke,’ and on his
blackboard he wrote down those words which the boys contributed as describing the blacks they knew; henceforth in any examination when Caveny asked his students, ‘What is the character of the Negro?’ Jake and the others were expected to frame their answers from this description:

For as long as Mr. Caveny’s pupils lived they would think of the British Turlocks as brave, honest, hospitable, industrious, temperate, hardy and enterprising, and the black Caters as beyond redemption, except for their ability to sing.