THE COPPERHEAD
BY HAROLD FREDERIC.
IN THE VALLEY.
Illustrated by Howard Pyle $1.50
THE LAWTON GIRL.
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SETH'S BROTHER'S WIFE.
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THE COPPERHEAD.
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THE COPPERHEAD
BY
HAROLD FREDERIC
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1893
COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ABNER BEECH 1
II. JEFF'S MUTINY 17
III. ABSALOM 35
IV. ANTIETAM 47
V. “JEE'S” TIDINGS 63
VI. NI'S TALK WITH ABNER 76
VII. THE ELECTION 90
VIII. THE ELECTION BONFIRE 106
IX. ESTHER'S VISIT 115
X. THE FIRE 133
XI. THE CONQUEST OF ABNER 146
XII. THE UNWELCOME GUEST 158
XIII. THE BREAKFAST 172
XIV. FINIS 182
THE COPPERHEAD
CHAPTER I
ABNER BEECH
It was on the night of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the old
farm-house was burned over our heads. By that reckoning I must have
been six or seven when I went to live with Farmer Beech, because at the
time he testified I had been with him half my life.
Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could have
gone to the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart,
thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading stern
hazel eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shut
mouth. His expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; all
the rest was bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rolling
downward in iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip,
which still may be found among the farmers of the old blood in our
district was, I dare say, a survival from the time of the Puritan
protest against the mustaches of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in the
latter days, had been told that this shaving on Wednesday and Saturday
nights was a New England rite, I feel sure he would never have touched
razor again.
He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time—a tremendous worker, a
“good provider,” a citizen of weight and substance in the community.
In all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead.
He was the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work in
his meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At one
period he was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was before
the episode of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-house
was supplied in those days by an irregular procession of itinerant
preachers, who came when the spirit moved and spoke with that entire
frankness which is induced by knowledge that the night is to be
spent somewhere else. One of these strolling ministers regarded all
attempts to protect property from lightning as an insolent defiance
of the Divine Will, and said so very pointedly in the pulpit, and the
congregation sat still and listened and grinned. Farmer Beech never
forgave them.
There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyond
the power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequence
the events which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech from
his fellows. My own recollections go with distinctness back to the
reception of the news that Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguer
way they cover the two or three preceding years. Very likely Farmer
Beech had begun to fall out of touch with his neighbors even before
that.
The circumstances of my adoption into his household—an orphan without
relations or other friends—were not of the sort to serve this
narrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no more
expected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchased
to toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurred
any debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community where
everyone worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to
do, and all shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep,
and the infrequent spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of
benefits conferred or received. My rights in the house and about the
place were neither less nor more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer's
only son.
In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit in
the household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was only
because he had been drawn off after strange gods.
At all times—even when nothing else good was said of him—Abner Beech
was spoken of by the people of the district as a “great hand for
reading.” His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to the
end. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which he
had on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there anyone
roundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussion
involving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him the
respect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreed
with by such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough,
became a formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They said
then that his opinions were worthless because he got them from printed
books, instead of from his heart.
What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from the
titles of the farmer's books. Perhaps there were some thirty of them
behind the glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one or
two agricultural or veterinary exceptions, they related exclusively
to American history and politics. There were, I recall, the first
two volumes of Bancroft, and Lossing's “Lives of the Signers,” and
“Field-Books” of the two wars with England; Thomas H. Benton's “Thirty
Years' View;” the four green-black volumes of Hammond's “Political
History of the State of New York;” campaign lives of Lewis Cass and
Franklin Pierce, and larger biographies of Jefferson and Jackson, and,
most imposing of all, a whole long row of big calf-bound volumes of
the _Congressional Globe_, which carried the minutiæ of politics at
Washington back into the forties.
These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyish
education. I have only the faintest and haziest recollections of what
happened when I went during the winter months to the school-house at
the Four Corners. But I can recall the very form of the type in the
farmer's books. Everyone of those quaint, austere, and beardless faces,
framed in high collars and stocks and waving hair—the Marcys, Calhouns,
DeWitt Clintons, and Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain's
primitive graver—gives back to me now the lineaments of an old-time
friend.
Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff,
and had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winter
evenings in poring over some of these books—generally with Abner Beech
at the opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rare
occasion one of the hired men would take down a volume and look through
it—the farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did not
wet his big thumbs to turn over the leaves—but for the most part we
two had the books to ourselves. The others would sit about till
bedtime, amusing themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting
or mending, the men cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and
apples and fried-cakes, as they talked over the work and gossip of the
district and tempted the scorching impulses of the stovehearth with
their stockinged feet.
This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the
household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew,
from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about
the things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that young
Jeff was never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and more
distinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that the
favoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hard
as ever, and got no more playtime than before. The master's eye was
everywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even my
alphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together—or
rather he talked and I listened—as if we were folk quite apart from the
rest.
Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all my
little notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and John
Marshall were among the most infamous characters in history. The other
was that every true American ought to hold himself in daily readiness
to fight with England. I gave a great deal of thought to both these
matters. I had early convictions, too, I remember, with regard to
Daniel Webster, who had been very bad, and then all at once became a
very good man. For some obscure reason I always connected him in my
imagination with Zaccheus up a tree, and clung to the queer association
of images long after I learned that the Marshfield statesman had been
physically a large man.
Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured by
fresher antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belial
who deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall.
With me the two stages of indignation glided into one another so
imperceptibly that I can now hardly distinguish between them. What I do
recall is that the farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy,
England, and to seem to have quite forgotten our own historic foes to
liberty, so enraged was he over the modern Abolitionists. He told me
about them as we paced up the seed rows together in the spring, as we
drove homeward on the hay-load in the cool of the summer evening, as
we shovelled out a path for the women to the pumps in the farm-yard
through December snows. It took me a long time to even approximately
grasp the wickedness of these new men, who desired to establish negro
sovereignty in the Republic, and to compel each white girl to marry a
black man.
The fact that I had never seen any negro “close to,” and had indeed
only caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on the
streets of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystified
alarm with which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finally
an old darky on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him,
incredibly ragged, dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through “Jump
Jim Crow” down at the Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of the
village loafers, the revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelled
that the others could laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging over
their silly heads.
At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class,
who lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places—chiefly New
England way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons among
them. They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloes
or a swarm of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks which
attracted my attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. The
farmer one day brought home with him from town a pamphlet composed
of anti-slavery sermons or addresses by this person. In the evening
he read it, or as far into it as his temper would permit, beating
the table with his huge fist from time to time, and snorting with
wrathful amazement. At last he sprang to his feet, marched over to
the wood-stove, kicked the door open with his boot, and thrust the
offending print into the blaze. It is vivid in my memory still—the way
the red flame-light flared over his big burly front, and sparkled on
his beard, and made his face to shine like that of Moses.
But soon I learned that there were Abolitionists
everywhere—Abolitionists right here in our own little farmland township
of northern New York! The impression which this discovery made upon
me was not unlike that produced on Robinson Crusoe by the immortal
footprint. I could think of nothing else. Great events, which really
covered a space of years, came and went as in a bunch together, while
I was still pondering upon this. John Brown was hanged, Lincoln was
elected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment was raised and
despatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County—and all the time it
seems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing fact that
some of our neighbors were Abolitionists.
There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all.
At first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then,
somehow, there came to be a number of them—and then, all at once, lo!
everybody was an Abolitionist—that is to say, everybody but Abner
Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others
became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the
ground, and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite
direction. The skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry
popular feeling burst swooping over the country-side, but Beech only
stiffened his back and never budged an inch.
At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church at
all. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform from
which the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity on
every recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whatever
of talking back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But when
others, mere laymen of the church, took up the theme, and began in
class-meetings and the Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist and
the Beast with Ten Horns and Seven Heads, in obvious connection with
Southern sympathizers, it became frankly insufferable. The farmer did
not give in without a fierce resistance. He collected all the texts
he could find in the Bible, such as “Servants obey your masters,”
“Cursed be Canaan,” and the like, and hurled them vehemently, with
strong, deep voice, and sternly glowing eyes, full at their heads. But
the others had many more texts—we learned afterwards that old “Jee”
Hagadorn enjoyed the unfair advantage of a Cruden's Concordance—and
their tongues were as forty to one, so we left off going to church
altogether.
Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of the
cheese-factory.
The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a common
roof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten years
old. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities of
vastly greater things than mere cheese-making. Its success among us had
stirred up in men's minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as the
answer to all American farm problems—as the gateway through which we
were to march into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recalls
now with a smile and a sigh. Farmers' wives continued to break down and
die under the strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums; the
farmers kept on hanging themselves in their barns, or flying westward
before the locustlike cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls turned
their steps townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium never
came at all.
But at that time—in the late fifties and early sixties—the
cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams
and roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district;
their disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a
town-meeting; their chief officers were even more important personages
than the supervisor and assessor.
Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. I
fancy he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you will
see it still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent to
it in those days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer for
miles around, reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice,
too, outweighed all others in its co-operative councils.
But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that a
man couldn't be a Christian and hold such views on the slave question
as Beech held, it was only a very short step to the conviction that
such a man would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theft
of a horse is the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sections
exalt to this pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasant
or a woman. Among our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk.
A man in our neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery or
bigamy outright, than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of putting
water into his cans.
Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I know
not—who started the story was never to be learned—but of a sudden
everybody seemed to have heard that Abner Beech's milk had been refused
at the cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was true
that there could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. But
what did happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains each
morning to test our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded the
lactometer, and sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in a
separate book, and behaved generally so that our hired man knocked him
head over heels into one of his whey vats. Then the managers complained
to the farmer. He went down to meet them, boiling over with rage. There
was an evil spirit in the air, and bitter words were exchanged. The
outcome was that Abner Beech renounced the co-operative curds of his
earlier manhood, so to speak, sold part of his cattle at a heavy loss,
and began making butter at home with the milk of the remainder.
Then we became pariahs in good earnest.