The Invisible Line (25 page)

 

 

 

 

 

O
.S.B. WALL DID NOT see the man enter his office. When the outside door to the building opened, the sounds of Seventh Street momentarily intruded—the streetcar groaning its way into the city, the coughs and curses of people choked by summer dust, a dull duet of hoofbeats and creaking wooden carts. Then the rap and drag of crutches slowly approaching. The sound of steady breath. The click of metal on metal. And the blast, deafening in a small space. An acrid wave of burnt powder washed over the room.
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Wall recognized the man who was steadying himself and raising the revolver a second time. He had only recently met James Davenport, once an army captain, now a clerk in the Second Auditor's Office at Treasury. The pale Kentuckian had not shot at anyone in seven years, since the day he led a charge into a rebel trench south of Atlanta and lost his leg in the screaming blur. Wall, in all his time in the Union army, had never come under fire. Now he was at war.
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Nowhere to hide, Wall palmed an old door hinge that he kept close by and ran straight at his attacker. With a swift slice through the air, he connected full force with Davenport's head, a thump of scalp and skull. A second blast knocked Wall to the floor. Dazed with pain, his shirt starting to soak with blood, he remained conscious as people rushed into the room. He felt the tight grip of strange hands, the heaving lift into the air, and the late-afternoon sun, warm in June. Up and down Seventh Street, people were calling out that Justice O.S.B. Wall had been shot.
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WHEN WALL FIRST CAME to the District of Columbia in February 1867, the Capitol was under construction. The White House looked dingy and gray in the snow. Winter rains had turned the city's thoroughfares into fields of stinking muck, in some places ten inches deep. Congressmen complained of “the infinite, abominable nuisance of cows, horses, sheep, and goats, running through all the streets,” regularly knocking down trees. Much of Washington's garbage was simply fed to “hogs in hog pens in almost every part of the city.” According to John Burroughs, a naturalist who spent his days as a Treasury Department clerk, turkey buzzards circled overhead by the dozen, “sweeping low over some common or open space where, perchance, a dead puppy or pig or fowl ha[d] been thrown.”
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Wall settled on Seventh Street just above the Boundary, which divided Washington City from the largely rural section of the District known as the County. Downtown, Seventh Street passed midway between the White House and the Capitol. Beyond the Boundary street, it stretched to the Maryland line, skirting the grand wooded estates of Washington's richest and most powerful people. Down where Wall lived, the army's Campbell Barracks housed the District's poorest residents, former slaves who were arriving from Virginia and Maryland by the thousands. On the hill rising above the barracks was farmland that was soon to become the Howard University campus.
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The five miles of Seventh Street between the Boundary and the Maryland line were virtually impassable. The road was narrow, steep, pocked with “murder-holes” and gulleys, and bounded on each side by gutters so deep and wide that they could swallow up horse and wagon. To get into the city safely, Washington's elite took elaborate detours over to Fourteenth Street. Farmers who lived just on the Maryland side of the border preferred to ride their crops to market dozens of miles away in Baltimore rather than take their chances with Seventh Street.
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The District remained haunted by four years of mass slaughter and the murder—still recent—of its most famous resident. The site of the crime, Ford's Theatre, had been turned into a museum, displaying dozens of “wet specimens” of “injuries done to the human body by shot and shell” during the rebellion—“glass cases of broken bones,” wrote one observer, “cracked and smashed and bulbous and exfoliated in every form of distortion, as poor mother nature had tried to glue them together and splice them again.” Outside, the District's streets were a living museum of the horrors of war, besieged by a spectral army of shattered veterans. Behind countless desks at every government agency, men were trying to last through a day without remembering their hours in hell. Black-clad widows making pension claims filled their own waiting room in the Senate. Throughout the city “raw and ragged” masses of men, women, and children who had fled slavery were starving, freezing, and dying in plain view.
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AT O.S.B. WALL'S HOME, the surgeon's examination was like being slowly bayoneted. The pain turned Wall's dimly lit bedroom into an unrecognizable, awful place. Robert Reyburn and Patrick Glennan inspected the small hole on the right side of Wall's stomach, just above the navel, as they had done too often during their days in the Union army. The lead ball had pierced Wall's gut near his liver, gallbladder, and intestines. Sponging off the blood and flushing the wound with water, they plunged a porcelaintipped wand into Wall's abdominal cavity. If the probe so much as touched the lead ball, a black mark would stain the white porcelain tip. After a seeming eternity, they pulled it out. Nothing. There would be far worse agonies to come.
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Lying in his sickbed, Wall told visitors he had no idea why James Davenport had tried to kill him. Weeks ago a woman named Wright had come to his office complaining that a man had sold her a faulty secondhand stove. Wall visited the man, Davenport, at his desk at Treasury and asked whether he intended to give Wright a refund. Davenport initially said that he would, but then changed his mind. Wall said that he “would have no more to do with the case” and that Wright and Davenport “might fight their own battles.” Wall had all but forgotten about Davenport when the man appeared in his doorway, pistol in hand.
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There was nothing remarkable about the dispute over the stove or Wall's role in it. In 1869 President Grant had appointed him the District's first colored justice of the peace, a position that empowered him to hear small claims cases. At the same time, he served as a local police magistrate, the first—and for minor offenders, the only—judicial figure people faced after arrest. For many poor blacks in the District, Wall was the law.

Even before assuming the title of Justice, Wall was used to people seeking his help. It was the reason he had come to the District in the first place. The mud and dust of a half-formed city, the suffering of tens of thousands of its residents—for Wall, these were not causes for despair. The District of Columbia was not simply an unpleasant place to live. It was a problem that needed solving, a project to be finished. So was the Republic itself, just two years after millions of slaves had become citizens through the brutal alchemy of war.

 

 

SHORTLY AFTER WALL'S ARRIVAL in the District of Columbia, he rode to Harpers Ferry on behalf of the Freedmen's Bureau. In April 1867 the Potomac River's rumble and roar echoed through the hills, swollen by snowmelt and spring rain. Just sixty miles downstream its bracing current stagnated in the malarial flats of Washington. But on the border separating Maryland from West Virginia, the river gave no hint of the mire ahead. It flowed in a steady rush of progress and escape.

In 1859 John Brown had martyred himself on this spot, attempting to spark a massive slave rebellion by raiding the federal armory at the Ferry; three Oberlin men had died fighting at his side. Eight years later O.S.B. Wall walked into town representing the government that had killed them. The town had been shot up, blasted, and emptied out. The only armory building to survive multiple rebel raids during the war was the one-story brick fire-engine and guard house where Brown had barricaded himself against U.S. Marines commanded by a colonel named Robert E. Lee. Most of Harpers Ferry's three thousand residents before the war had abandoned the place, many to join the rebellion. During the war the Ferry teemed with Union soldiers, guarding this strategic railroad junction and gateway to the Shenandoah Valley. By 1867 the soldiers were gone too. In their place nearly a thousand men, women, and children drifted in from the Shenandoah Valley and the eastern West Virginia panhandle, hoping to find freedom after lives of bondage. Instead, with war's end, what they found was no jobs. Augustus Ferzard Higgs, a twenty-three-year-old army lieutenant working with the Freedmen's Bureau, described the town as a “nest of paupers,” a hell of cholera and pox and starving children. Slavery was dead. John Brown's disciples controlled the government. But the fight was not over.
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Wall met with Augustus Higgs in April 1867 through his work with the Bureau's District of Columbia office, which had just been given responsibility for West Virginia. In the company of a “few persons here, white and colored, who are most interested in the welfare of the Freedpeople,” Wall inspected the wretched conditions. “A very large population of them are either entirely idle, or get only partial employment,” he wrote. “There are quite a number of families who are so very degraded they take no interest in the education of their own children.”
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The night after his arrival hundreds crowded the schoolhouse to hear Wall speak. Responding to the squalid destitution of the freedpeople, Lieutenant Higgs had written that “nothing but a revolution or something similar will change this state of affairs.” Looking out at faces flickering with the lantern light, Wall claimed to offer that “something similar”: new homes and jobs in the West, with transportation provided by the government. No more cholera, no more hunger, no more idle want, no more fear of violence. Afterward, people emerged from the shadows to give him their names, and he set up another session, “as the entire meeting desired me to talk to them again.”
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Wall had left the comforts of Oberlin to devote himself to the cause of integrating newly freed men and women into American life. It was the cause of his country and his race. The Freedmen's Bureau head, General Oliver Otis Howard, appealed to triumphant abolitionists across the North and West to redirect their holy fervor to perhaps the one task more difficult than destroying slavery: building a new world from its ashes. Wall's brother-in-law John Mercer Langston, appointed a general inspector in the Bureau, was traveling throughout the South, “arousing, inspiring and encouraging the free people” to educate themselves, save money, build “comfortable necessary homes,” and participate constructively in public life so that “they may win the respect and gain the confidence even of those who formerly held them in bondage.”
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Langston's speeches stressed that with slavery's demise the Constitution guaranteed “our people their rights and privileges” without “any complexional discrimination,” but Wall had seen in South Carolina that the bare language of the Constitution was not enough to establish freedom and equality. Citizenship was not simply a function of education, savings, and civic involvement. If anything, Negro gains only strengthened white hatred, a hatred that overwhelmed any obligation to obey mere words on paper. In Wall's experience, the law was neither the Constitution nor the legislature's enactments. It was how people lived every day. Without a grounding in base political authority—without the moral force or brute leverage to make people follow a rule until they believed in it—not even the most soul-stirring appeals to basic American values would stop whites in the South from enslaving blacks in one way or another.
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Wall held out little hope that white Southerners would learn to see their erstwhile property as people. Instead he joined the Freedmen's Bureau District of Columbia field office as an employment agent. If the situation in Harpers Ferry was bad, it was immeasurably worse downriver. Some thirty thousand blacks in the District were jobless and destitute, more slave than citizen. They still bore the designation given them by the Army when they fled to the Union lines as fugitive property: “contrabands.” One of the first freedoms that former slaves had asserted was the freedom to move off the plantation and away from their masters. It was why Washington was overflowing with new residents, why entire areas of the city were, in one newspaper's words, more “characteristic of Senegambia than of the United States.” But with few job prospects awaiting them, the migrants' freedom to move seemed to lead inexorably to slums, starvation, crime, and disease. Across the South Bureau officials were pressuring people to return to their plantations and go back to living, in everything but name, as slaves.
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Wall's mission was different. He knew firsthand that geographic mobility could lead to social betterment. Had his father not sent him to Ohio, he would never have become a respected war veteran and government official—he would be just another anonymous Negro in North Carolina whom Freedmen's Bureau field agents discussed in their reports to headquarters. As long as the migrants had a destination, however, their freedom to move could become a solution for the nation, not a problem. Wall would find the freedpeople work in the North. Where there were good jobs, blacks could become part of the free economy, without having to fight sworn enemies every step of the way. Educating their children would not seem like a revolutionary act. They could acquire property, the key to full citizenship. By lining up positions in advance, Wall hoped to disrupt the concentrated poverty that made life in the District miserable for so many and gave ammunition to the enemies of civil rights. He was trying to create a pathway from freedom to equality.