Simms Bell attended Yale College, where he met a lanky, hazel-eyed South Carolinian, John Calhoun, from the Ninety Six district in the northwest part of the state up along the Savannah River. Calhoun was two years ahead of Simms. He came of a pioneering family that had seen some of its members massacred by marauding Cherokees forty years earlier. He’d grown up a farmer’s son, educated by itinerant schoolmasters, then at Reverend Moses Waddel’s well-regarded Carmel Academy in Appling, Georgia.
Calhoun made no secret of disliking Charleston and its effete planters who never soiled their hands; he worked family land himself. He informed Simms that the epidemics and hurricanes that periodically decimated Charleston were “a curse for her intemperance and debaucheries.”
Simms was in awe of John Calhoun, whose austere appearance and personality set him apart. At six two, with brown hair standing up stiff as a brush and eyes deeply sunken in a craggy face, he had the look of a primitive. There was nothing primitive about his mind or ambition. What he would be in the future, other than a lawyer, was not yet clear, but Simms expected that Mr. Calhoun would amount to something in their home state, if not the nation. He was already a dedicated Democratic-Republican, intolerant of the Federalist vision of a strong, expanding central government.
Simms didn’t share Calhoun’s political ambition or his puritanical attitude. Simms became a regular patron of New Haven’s dramshops and brothels, assuring his mother by letter that of course he was too busy with studies to indulge in such behavior. After graduation he planned to go home and devote himself to the family lands whose profits he meant to increase, with a corresponding rise in his own comfort and importance.
The backdrop for all of this was the new nation, expanding and changing dramatically.
The Federalists who had shaped and secured the Constitution saw their power threatened by the Democratic-Republican party. Its candidates in the election of 1800, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Burr, ascended to the presidency and vice presidency after a tie in the electoral college threw the vote into the House. Philadelphia was no longer the seat of government; Jefferson and Burr took up their duties in Washington.
Napoleon bestrode Europe. War between France and England prompted British interference with neutral shipping that might aid the French. The issue of harassment of American ships and impressment of American seamen grew from an irritant to a potential cause of conflict, at a time when the young nation felt a burgeoning national power and pride. The American navy had humiliated the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and forced an end to extortion of tribute.
In 1811 members of the Eleventh Congress took their seats. A group known as War Hawks advocated hostilities with Britain. One of the War Hawks was Simms’s old classmate, John Calhoun.
Lydia ignored the threatened crisis, wrongly assuming it would ignore her and her city. She appeared to have cleansed her conscience of any guilt connected with Edward’s death. It was seldom in her thoughts and never in a troubling way.
Distorted scenes from the river dock did appear occasionally in her dreams. More than once she saw Edward trapped in the alligator’s jaws, his eyes horrific fires of accusation. She no longer admitted any love for Edward, only hatred. His stiff-necked righteousness had robbed her of what she’d wanted most in all the world, Edward himself.
Then a curious incident changed everything.
Lydia was fifty-two in 1811. The year brought her two great satisfactions. The first was the natural death of Edward’s widow, Joanna. Lydia attended the funeral, thought herself coolly treated, but took pleasure in the passing of a rival she’d failed to defeat.
Even more gratifying was her son’s announcement that after the sickly season, he planned to wed Miss Bethel Vanderhorst, a pretty, bland young woman from an impeccable family. Lydia approved of the alliance, indeed had urged Simms to pursue it. She knew she could dominate the simpleminded girl and thereby continue to guide her son.
She traveled to New York to shop for wedding finery. She’d made the journey before. She liked the variety of merchandise available in the grubby, noisy city, though she loathed the rude Yankees, who hadn’t the sense to hide their rapacious commercialism behind a smile and a pleasantry, as Charleston people did. In a roundabout way she liked New York for its contrast with her home. Charleston’s climate and gracious ways were all the more pleasing after exposure to the crudeness of the North.
Because of the international situation sea travel presented dangers beyond the usual ones of weather. Lydia chose to sail to and from New York anyway. It was that or endure a long trip squeezed in a stagecoach, bumping and banging over wretched roads among low-class strangers who smelled bad. After ten days spent in New York’s finest emporiums, she sailed south on the sidewheel steamer Decatur, named after the hero of the 1804 battle of Tripoli.
On the third day of the voyage the ship plowed through a heavy green sea. Lightning crackled above the yards. Gale winds howled; waves crashed over the bow. Despite that Lydia managed a nap in the late afternoon. When she woke, the ship’s violent rolling and pitching had stopped.
She left her tiny cabin eagerly. One of the ship’s six passengers, a Methodist pastor, had suffered attacks of seasickness; the smell in the cabin gangway was vile. She went up into the stormy twilight wearing a fine traveling dress of black pongee with a straight Greco-Roman skirt. Cost in New York, $110. However mean the circumstances in which she found herself, Lydia always wanted to represent the very best of Southern society.
According to the captain they should now be off the coast of North Carolina. It was impossible to see land; a fog had settled. Decatur moved ahead dead slow, clanging its bell.
She peered across the port rail, then abruptly rubbed her eyes. In the gray-green murk she saw a shape hovering several feet above the waves. It floated slowly toward the ship. A moment later she identified it.
“Edward?”
Water streamed from his chin, elbows, the hem of his coat. Weeds festooned his hair. Bits of scum speckled his face like marks of some foul disease. As he drifted closer, she saw that his eyes were white, without irises. His face was twisted into malevolence, as though the features once so attractive to her had melted like candle wax, then hardened.
She screamed and fainted.
She was discovered on the wet deck a few minutes later and rushed to her cabin. She awoke sweating and trembling. Edward was alive. That is, some part of him was alive, mysteriously and malignantly, and had come back to haunt and possibly harm her.
She couldn’t have feared him more if he’d been black.
Lydia reached Charleston safely but soon went into a decline. Years of suppressed guilt gave way to a persistent dread of discovery and punishment. It painted permanent gray semicircles under her eyes. She woke in the night, raving and thrashing. She ate normally but lost weight. Simms summoned the learned Dr. Hippocrates Sapp to Prosperity Hall.
Dr. Sapp appeared with the physician’s traditional long black coat and gold-headed cane. He questioned Lydia at length, privately. Afterward he told Simms that his mother was quite obviously disturbed but he was baffled as to the cause. Nor would she reveal it. Sapp wrote an order for a calmative containing opium. Lydia learned to gulp it by the spoonful, several times a day.
In 1812 the militant congressional junto carried the day. The United States declared war against Britain.
The navy won stunning victories off Nova Scotia, Brazil, the Madeira Islands, then in Lake Erie in 1813. Charleston remained far from the actual fighting but prepared nonetheless, building fortifications on the Neck similar to those in the Revolution. Fifteen artillery pieces guarded White Point, which people began to refer to as the Battery.
During this time Lydia alternated between periods of peaceful lucidity and frenetic anxiety. She became increasingly hostile toward the household slaves, regularly accusing them of plotting to poison her food or set the house on fire while she slept. When a pearl earring disappeared from her jewel box, she blamed a fourteen-year-old g
irl named Aphrodite. Despite the girl’s tearful denial Lydia ordered her earlobes slit with a sharp knife. She calmly read a newspaper in another room while the girl screamed.
Days later Aphrodite ran away. She was never caught. Her replacement found the earring in a dark corner of Lydia’s wardrobe.
By default, the management of the family’s affairs had fallen to Simms, now settled with the phlegmatic and obedient Bethel in a small house of his own not far from Malvern. There, a daughter, Ouida, was born in 1813, and a son, Gibbes, four years later.
The war dramatically improved the fortunes of another Charlestonian, William Lark’s son, Crittenden. Crittenden’s late mother had taught him to hate Edward Bell’s family. From his father he’d inherited a lack of scruples; he was not remotely acquainted with anything resembling morality.
He organized a syndicate to build and outfit a 140-ton privateer, Saucy Lady, at a yard on the Wando River. He controlled only a small number of shares in the syndicate, yet he was its motor and ultimately made all the decisions. This was because he was an abrasive, domineering partner and because he sailed with his vessel as supercargo, the only investor brave enough, or greedy enough, to do so.
Saucy Lady eluded British blockade ships, captured an enemy frigate off the Atlantic coast, then two smaller Spanish merchantmen. Prize courts made Crittenden Lark a wealthy man shortly after he turned thirty.
Edward’s son, Edgar, meanwhile, had continued to live in the house of his grandfather. Edgar read law at the prestigious firm of Henry DeSaussure. Calhoun had done it before him, then gone off to finish his legal training in Connecticut.
Like his father, Edgar took up law for its practical value in the business of Bell’s Bridge, a business that demanded his full attention in the years of the cotton boom. He did establish a law office in partnership with Argyll Buckles. Simon’s son handled virtually all the cases brought to Buckles & Bell.
Edgar Bell was a plain, quiet, conservative man, with strong opinions on the affairs of his city, state, and country. In 1813 he married Cassandra Mayfield, daughter of Llewellyn Mayfield, a retired schoolmaster from Moncks Corner.
Mayfield was a large, amiable man with a talent for making unprofitable investments. He was a founding shareholder of the Santee Canal Company, which financed a water link between the Santee River and the head of the Cooper, for easier transportation of cotton and rice to the coast. Though busy for a time, the canal never became the overwhelming success Mayfield and his colleagues envisioned.
Mayfield ably fulfilled the role of doting grandfather after the arrival of his daughter’s children, Hampton in 1814 and a sister, Alexandra, one year later. Subsequently Cassandra delivered two stillborn daughters. She and Edgar decided that God meant them to have only two children, but that was enough for them, and for Mayfield. He constantly overextended himself buying books, toys, and sweets for infants too young to appreciate them.
In 1814 enemy ships bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor but failed to reduce and capture it. Out of this came verses for a new patriotic song, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The British marched on Washington, savaging and burning the capital. Yet they couldn’t find a victory; the Americans were too fierce and determined.
That same year, at the Horseshoe Bend of Alabama’s Tallapoosa River, Gen. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, sometimes called Old Hickory, sometimes Old Sharp Knife, defeated the Cherokee and the feared Red Stick warriors of the Creek nation in a spectacular battle. When this became known in Charleston, a few graybeards recalled a skinny hot-tempered boy from the Waxhaws, Andy by name, who had come down to the city in 1783 to claim a small inheritance. Fascinated by the rattle and snap of dice in Charleston’s gambling dens, he lost it all.
Jackson gambled again in 1815, vanquishing British regulars at New Orleans two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent was signed; news of the peace had not yet reached America. Jackson’s reputation was made. When he visited Washington, he was hailed as enthusiastically as any Roman Caesar. He would loom large in the country’s future, and that of John Calhoun, and South Carolina.
Of these events Lydia was only marginally aware. Simms continued to question his mother about the source of her nervous condition. She refused to name it, but another incident in the summer of 1816 offered a clue.
Simms and Bethel invited Lydia to one of the city-sponsored concerts in the public garden at White Point. They left three-year-old Ouida with her Negro nurse at Simms’s new town house on Legare Street. The house was an older one that the Bells had enlarged and redecorated. Its finest feature was a pair of intricate gates to the side garden. The unknown craftsman had created a pattern of swords and spears in wrought iron. Simms, never wildly imaginative, christened the house Sword Gate.
Charleston’s full burden of summer heat and humidity had not yet arrived. The evening air on the Battery was mild and pleasant. The only thing unpleasant for Lydia and, to a lesser degree, Simms, was the proximity of Tom Bell’s house. Relations between the two sides of the family were cool; social meetings were few and always strained.
The concert crowd was largely elite, representative of old families and those of newly rich planters. One of the latter, an unidentified gentleman who bore a slight resemblance to Tom Bell’s younger son, caught Lydia’s attention. From the first note of the first selection, the rousing “Hail, Columbia,” she ignored the performance, her son, and Bethel, fixing her eyes on the stranger. Her expression grew strained. Nervous excitement made her blink and breathe rapidly.
Simms asked if she felt ill; his mother had enjoyed several months of relatively normal behavior. Her hand clamped on his sleeve. She whispered, “He’s here. Don’t look.”
“Who’s here, Mother?” Simms said as the chamber orchestra began a piece by Mozart. Those on nearby benches cast disapproving looks at the talkers. Lydia lunged to her feet.
“His ghost.”
“Please sit down. There’s no such thing.”
“Yes, he’s here, he’s here.” Lydia threw off her son’s hand. “He won’t let me alone. He won’t rest until our family’s destroyed.” Tears streamed from her eyes.
Unnerved, Bethel issued one of her rare fiats. “Simms, we must go. This is humiliating.”
Simms put his arm around his mother. Lydia began to struggle. Heads turned. The musicians stopped randomly, creating a cacophony of strings and woodwinds. Red faced, Simms said, “Ladies and gentlemen, forgive the interruption. My mother is indisposed.”
He led her away. She continued to struggle, but he was stronger. Leaving the garden, she threw looks over her shoulder at the baffled nonentity whose appearance had triggered the outburst. She kept whispering. “He’ll see us all ruined. Ruined or dead.”
In bed on Legare Street after a heavy dose of her calmative, Lydia refused to answer questions about her imagined tormentor, or name him.
Edgar’s son, Hampton, grew up a frail boy who showed signs of remaining that way. His sister, Alexandra, was large at birth. Cassandra fretted over the possibility that her daughter would be an inordinately tall woman, very inconvenient for romance. A dear friend had stayed a spinster due to extreme height and a paltry dowry.
The four years from 1815 to 1819 were the summit of Charleston’s prosperity. People invested and expanded, built and bought, with reckless enthusiasm. In 1818 Edgar emulated Crittenden Lark and put money into a scheme to launch two oceangoing cargo ships. When the price of cotton plunged a year later, he faced heavy interest debt on the first ship, which sat unfinished on the ways of the Pritchard & Shrewsbury yard. At the same time, with trade declining, Edgar’s income from the wharf was sharply down.
He had been approached more than once about selling Malvern. He and Cassandra and the children seldom visited the river house. Looking after it complicated his life, but he felt he owed it to the memory of his forebears to hold on to it. By 1820 his financial position required a rethinking of family loyalty.
An attorney known for sharp dealing
came to him with an offer from a Mr. Stiles Blevins, merchant, of Georgetown. Edgar had never heard of Blevins, but his money was safely in escrow, so after consultation with Cassandra, Edgar signed the settlement papers and transferred the deed. Six months later Blevins sold Malvern to Simms Bell.
Edgar was furious. He confronted Simms at a performance of the reopened Charleston Theater at Savage’s Green, on Broad Street west of Meeting. For years people of color, free and slave, had been permitted to buy seats in the third tier. In 1818 that was stopped.
Edgar accused Simms of using deception to acquire Malvern. Simms was all charm and good humor.
“Of course I had to resort to a subterfuge, cousin. My dear mother wanted the place, but I knew you wouldn’t sell it to us directly.”
Edgar would have knocked him down and challenged him to a duel at Washington Race Course if he’d been that sort of man. He had a conservative’s dislike of duels and those who resorted to them. Dueling broke the law and set a bad example for the lower classes. Turning his back on Simms, Edgar collected Cassandra from their first-tier box and missed the last two acts of Richard III.
Edgar and his late mother had always suspected that Lydia Bell had a hand in Edward’s death, or at least knew more about it than she would admit. Since there was no evidence to support the suspicions, the mystery remained unsolved, a source of frustration and private pain.
Inevitably, slavery became a national issue. In 1819 Congress confronted the expansion of slavery, specifically in the Louisiana Territory purchased from France in 1803. It was more than a question of a state’s right to choose its system of labor—it affected the fragile balance of power in the country.