On Saturday, December 14, the final units left the city, having stripped it of five thousand slaves, huge stocks of dried indigo, and goods from looted homes. The Americans came marching up King Street shortly after 11:00 A.M., led by a young general named Anthony Wayne.
General Leslie had ordered the citizens to stay indoors, conduct no partisan demonstrations, but as the last of the redcoats marched down Boundary Street to Gadsden’s Wharf, small flags and bits of bunting appeared at windows on King Street. People of all ages spilled onto the footpaths.
At first they were quiet. Then they began to clap and stamp in rhythm with the fifes and drums serenading Charleston with “Yankee Doodle.” Where Edward stood with his arm around Joanna, an old lady in a mobcap leaned from an upper window and waved a handkerchief at the soldiers. “God bless you, gentlemen. Welcome home, gentlemen.” It grew to a chant, a roar that drowned the music. “God bless you, gentlemen. Welcome home, gentlemen.”
Joanna pressed her cheek against Edward’s shoulder. “Oh, I do think it’s over at last.”
“I believe so, yes.” He spoke reflectively, without enthusiasm, because he wasn’t sure. In the last month two more British merchants had been mysteriously murdered. He thought of his estranged brother, and the Larks, and all the grime and guilt left on him by the war. With time he hoped his dark feelings would pass, but he wasn’t sanguine. He hugged Joanna. “Marburg can come back to town, anyway.”
The chanting roared over them, waves of joyful noise. It was a day of triumph, but incomplete. St. Michael’s steeple, painted white again, rang no bells in celebration.
21
1791
“There he is, Edgar, the President. Do you see him? The tall man in the custom house barge? It’s the biggest boat, with the American flag.”
Edward was vastly more excited than the small boy riding on his shoulder in the midst of the crowd on East Bay. Edgar was six. He’d inherited his father’s lanky build, his mother’s round face and russet curls. Instead of being duly appreciative of the pomp and ceremony of this first Monday in May, he wriggled until he attracted the attention of the handsome ten-year-old who’d come with them to the foot of Queen Street. Poorly and Sally’s son, Hamnet, had light brown skin and a ready smile; only his black hair and full lips spoke of black parentage.
Edgar pulled out the corners of his mouth, a hideous face. Hamnet laughed and said, “Hush, you, I want to see General Washington.”
“And sit still,” Edward said with a firm hand on his son’s leg. Edward was thirty-three now, beginning to thicken at the waist. Joanna kept a good kitchen.
Band music reached them from the nautical procession crossing the Cooper. Washington was in the midst of a ceremonial tour of the South. His retinue included a second boatload of musicians. Sailboats and rowboats, fifty or more, trailed the President’s party. Spectators hung from windows, sat on roof peaks, filled the decks of vessels anchored in the river and tied up at piers. A few daring men and boys had climbed masts to watch from spars and rigging.
As the barge drew into Prioleau’s Wharf, Edward read the words blazoned on it above the state seal. LONG LIVE THE PRESIDENT. Twelve navy captains in sky-blue jackets worked the oars, a thirteenth calling the stroke. Washington remained standing in the bow, a commanding man of fifty-nine years. He raised his cocked hat to acknowledge the crowd’s ovation.
The wharf itself was closed off by an honor guard from the German Fusilier Company. City and state dignitaries waited at the landing stage. Edward recognized Governor Pinckney, South Carolina’s two senators, and the intendant, Vanderhorst.
After the ceremonial welcome the fusiliers fired fifteen rounds in salute. Over the rooftops came the sweet familiar sound of St. Michael’s bells. They’d been sold in London to the successor to the original foundry, where two broken bells had been recast. Then the entire peal was bought by a member of Parliament. That enterprising gentleman shipped the bells to Charleston in the autumn of 1783, expecting to receive a fine price from St. Michael’s vestry. A subscription was undertaken but after eight years had raised little money. Paid for or not, the bells hung in their rightful place and serenaded the visiting President.
“I want to go home,” Edgar announced.
“What, you don’t want to follow the parade?”
The boy shook his head. Edward lowered him from an aching shoulder and clasped his hand. “Well, I do, so keep your peace.”
Edgar pouted, but he knew better than to argue; his father was a disciplinarian. Hamnet put his arm around the boy’s shoulder, said something that brought a giggle and immediate improvement of Edgar’s spirits.
The sheriff, carrying the great mace of the city, led the parade to the Exchange at the eastern end of Broad Street. Local and state officials followed, including representatives of the city’s thirteen wards. Hired scavengers had removed litter from the line of march, as well as dead dogs, cats, and rats, which typically lay rotting in the public ways. The air didn’t smell too badly; cattle- and hogpens near East Bay had been emptied for the occasion.
Washington appeared briefly on the steps of the Exchange. Then, with his hosts and retinue, he set off on foot for his lodgings in the mansion of Judge Thomas Heyward on Church Street. So began Charleston’s week of presidential jubilee. Edward’s life came to a halt, as did the life of almost every prominent citizen.
Much had changed in Charleston since the war. The new nation had a new government and constitution. Four South Carolinians, men of property dedicated to the concept of a republic guided by aristocrats, had led and won the fight at the constitutional convention for extension of the slave trade until 1808.
By act of the state legislature South Carolina had a new capital, an upstart town on the Congaree in the scrubby hills of the midlands. A contest of names, Washington versus Columbia, had been won by the latter. Some state offices were still duplicated in Charleston, whose prideful citizens pretended that the other capital didn’t exist.
The city had incorporated in 1783, officially doing away with older spellings of the name, as if to show that nothing tied it to the mother country except history. Charleston’s chief executive, the intendant, governed with his thirteen wardens, white men who paid a substantial amount of tax for the privilege.
The city had grown. Population now stood somewhere above sixteen thousand, more than half black. Attractive homes lined the streets of the lower peninsula, but odious rookeries crowded too many sections, pouring their garbage and night soil into the open, until the earth itself reeked. Above Boundary Street, where the air was fresher, developers were confidently laying out new residential lots.
Fine new buildings abounded. A new State House at Broad and Meeting replaced the earlier one destroyed in a fire. A handsome four-story brick structure housed orphans and abandoned bastards, of which the city had a large supply.
A small and struggling college was educating a few students. There was a Catholic chapel, the city’s first. A climate of tolerance still prevailed, except in matters of slave discipline.
In this atmosphere of growth and prosperity Edward conducted a part-time law practice in two rooms on Broad Street. On the wall behind his desk hung a large faux-bronze copy of the new city seal. His membership in the local Chamber of Commerce prompted this demonstration of civic pride. Adam Fleet, a free mulatto carpenter of Hard Work Alley, had carved and painted the seal. Fleet was the artisan to whom young Hamnet was apprenticed.
Moses Marburg had married a black-haired beauty named Sarah Levi. Sarah was the daughter of the local agent of the Amsterdam indigo merchants Edward had dealt with. Marburg had successfully made the transition from soldier to retailer. In 1786, with a loan from Edward, already repaid, he’d opened his small shop on King Street. Over the front door he hung a wooden sign saying simply MARBURG BOOKSELLER. A decoration in somber colors depicted a bearded scholar in a black skullcap seated with his lamp and book. Marburg was not one to hide his faith.
The port of Charlest
on still shipped tons of rice and indigo to the world, but cotton was a crop of rising importance. Edward had terminated the indigo leases at Malvern and put the land into long-staple sea island cotton. Upland farmers grew the short-staple variety, less hardy and more difficult and expensive to process and loom. It yielded a cloth less luxurious than the other. The upland cotton was produced and shipped, to be sure, but it was a stepchild in the trade.
Not necessarily forever, Edward’s new wharf manager said. Simon Buckles, a devout Scots Presbyterian, twice had journeyed down to Georgia to inspect machinery designed by a man named Eli Whitney. If Whitney could perfect a gin to efficiently remove seeds from short-staple cotton, Buckles believed that segment of the market would explode. As it was, Charleston’s cotton shipments were huge; over a million and a half pounds this year. A lot of it passed through Bell’s Bridge.
The only commodity that did not was the one Edward had banned in 1782. By state law Charleston wharves no longer trafficked in imported slaves. A narrow margin of up-country votes controlled the legislature, and that section of the state opposed slavery. A 1787 law closed down the trade for three years. Friends of Edward’s in the business community said the ban might be lifted if matters of profit and loss forced a change. Edward looked at the state’s booming cotton crop and suspected that it might come to pass.
Buckles was a bluff, red-bearded man whose wife, Fiona, had given him nine children, all but the last born in Scotland. Simon was an enthusiast and an optimist, his only bad trait being a tendency to lard his speech with so many unfamiliar words from his native land that Edward often lost his temper, demanded a translation and even a special dictionary. It was Buckles and his fellow Scots of the South Carolina Golf Club who had introduced Edward to the curious and frustrating sport at Harleston’s Green. Edward played when he could, but he didn’t play well. He tended to swish by the feather-stuffed leather ball with the great wooden club head, cursing violently afterward.
Edward and Joanna moved comfortably in respected social circles. They attended balls in the winter social season, and sat through evenings of Mozart and Haydn organized by the St. Cecilia Society. Edward squirmed the whole time, but he did enjoy the traveling theatrical companies that played the new Harmony Hall on upper King Street. He had his own gentlemen’s smoking and discussion club, the Fortnightly.
In 1787, with Bell’s Bridge thriving, he’d rebuilt Malvern. It offered memories of his youth and a retreat from the epidemics, storms, and soggy heat of the summer. Joanna and Edgar loved the place.
It had taken a long time for Edward and Joanna to conceive a child. Edgar’s birth had been hard. No other children blessed their house, so they lavished all their love on one. Joanna’s father had gone to his rest in 1783, too soon to see his grandson.
In 1788 a letter from St. Lucia in the West Indies informed Edward that Adrian had died of Barbados fever.
He was but thirty-five, on the threshold of great success with the cultivation of cotton. Here, too, our infant daughter perished five years ago, at age three. Your brother and I would not have been exiled to this pestilential place were it not for you. I trust you do not sleep easy.
Lydia’s outburst testified to an unsteady mind. Edward wrote her saying he’d arranged for Prosperity Hall to be transferred to the list of amerced lands.
No great hardship these days, as the strongest animosities of the late war are cooling.
Not hers, obviously.
I await your decision on whether you wish to pay the tax or sell the plantation. The question need not be settled quickly. Many properties remain in the same uncertain state, free of undue pressure for resolution.
He received no answer.
The week was a whirl of civic and social activities. On Tuesday, Edward joined a delegation from the Chamber of Commerce to present compliments to the President at Heyward’s mansion. That evening he attended a citizens’ dinner in the Exchange while Joanna frantically sewed a gown for a ball the next night.
Wednesday, Washington toured the remains of the wartime fortifications, received a delegation from the Sons of Cincinnati and another from the Masonic order to which he belonged. For the ball the Exchange blazed with lanterns and a great transparency of the initials G.W. over the entrance. Edward wore his best suit of indigo-blue velvet. Joanna, whom he thought lovely in her peach-colored dress, had paid to have her hair done up and powdered. A spangled medallion bearing the words Long Live the President was pinned to the high pile.
“Isn’t he a handsome man?” she whispered as the President moved gracefully among the guests, a striking figure in black velvet, white stockings, silver knee buckles, sword, and yellow gloves. Standing well over six feet, he never escaped notice in a crowd.
“I can’t see anyone but you,” Edward said. She laughed and teased his chin with her souvenir fan, on which a painted Goddess of Fame crowned Washington with a laurel wreath. The motto read Magnus in Pace, Magnus in Bello.
On it went—inspection of the harbor forts; a concert at the Exchange sponsored by the St. Cecilia Society (Edward writhed through more Haydn). Friday brought the capstone, another ball, with a much restricted guest list, at Governor Pinckney’s mansion on lower Meeting Street.
The house was a fantasy of colored lanterns, music, sparkling wine, fashionable women, important men. The walled garden had been turned into an outdoor promenade, perfect for the mild spring evening. Here Edward encountered Adrian’s friend Lescock, a vision of bright shoe buckles, gold frogging, and a tall peruke showering powder on his shoulders.
Lescock waved a lace handkerchief to catch Edward’s eye. “Dear man, how is that Arabian horse you bought?”
Emboldened by wine, Edward said, “Faster than your mare, Archie.” The new horse was pastured at Malvern with Brown Eyes, who was enjoying a peaceful old age.
“Is that so? We shall have to put that assertion to the test when the Jockey Club resumes its meetings.”
“So long as there’s a substantial wager on the outcome, I’m for it. I’ll ride Prince Mahmoud myself.”
“Brave boy,” Lescock purred with a roll of his eyes. Like many in Charleston he still venerated the king and aped the court. Edward excused himself. Lescock fluttered his handkerchief. “I shall call you to account about that wager.”
On Saturday, Washington visited the new Orphan House, then climbed to the belfry of St. Michael’s for a view of the city and harbor islands from 186 feet in the air. The evening brought a final banquet, sponsored by town merchants. The President attended Sunday services at both St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s. The pews overflowed; Edward felt as though he was imprisoned in a clothespress.
Then it was over. Early Monday the great man and his party took the road for Savannah. Edward rose in a good mood, though he found himself belching and breaking wind as a consequence of all the rich food and fine wine consumed during the week. He could no longer roister as he had in the old days.
On a brisk walk from home to his law office, he focused on a complicated legal matter he was trying to unsnarl. It involved two sisters and their avaricious husbands. Both sisters claimed the family’s original headright acreage in Saxe Gotha Township. Edward was mulling a compromise to propose when he accidentally collided with a woman in a mobcap that shadowed her garishly rouged face. He presumed she was just another of the drabs who solicited in public. “Beg pardon.” He tipped his hat and hurried by.
“I know you.” Her cry stopped him, swung him around. “Edward Bell.”
“I’m afraid I can’t reciprocate, madam. I’m sure we haven’t met before.”
She stepped closer. Along with the scent of cloves she was chewing, he got a whiff of rotten teeth. “Bridgit Lark’s my name. I know it was you killed William.”
“William…?”
“My husband. I know it was you. He feared you would, because of military action he took against you.”
Edward’s stupefaction changed to ire. “Military action? Better to use the word murd
er.”
“And you repaid it in kind.” She spoke so loudly, people on the footpath stared.
Pierced by guilt, Edward replied awkwardly. “You’ve no proof of that, madam.”
“I don’t need any. I’ve taught my son to remember your name and what you did. You’ll pay for killing my William, you and your tribe, don’t think you won’t.”
And she was gone, leaving Edward speechless in the sunshine.
22
Tales of Terror
Admiration for all things French consumed the nation. Lafayette was venerated. Marburg sold many copies of The Rights of Man, Tom Paine’s tract extolling the ideals of the French Revolution. Edward stayed up late reading it and next day asked Joanna to fashion a tricolor cockade. He pinned it to a new Parisian-style hat, tall and tapering, with a round brim. For wear at the wharf she made a pair of white trousers with thin vertical stripes of red and blue. His Fortnightly Club celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille with a special dinner on July 14.
Not all Charlestonians caught the revolutionary spirit. Archibald Lescock paraded in the apparel of an elegant, an antirevolutionist. Edward encountered him at a coffeehouse, resplendent in an emerald silk frock coat with a high turndown collar. He wore enough musk scent for a woman.
Lescock said plans were being made to reopen the racetrack north of the original city wall. He would pit his mare against Edward’s stallion at the first opportunity. “What a pleasure it will be to beat a sansculotte,” he said, smirking and tapping Edward’s striped trousers with his weighted stick.