Michener, James A. (115 page)

Reuben did not propose to be girdled, not by nature, which he battled, nor by Northern abolitionists, who threatened his prosperity and his way of life, and he was more afraid of the latter than the former: 'Nature you can control. If the great flood comes, you hunker down and let it come, then use it later to your advantage ' At Lakeview there were three bottomlands: the low-bottoms, which were underwater much of the time; the middle-bottoms, which presented a reasonable gamble; and what might be called the upper-bottoms, which had been underwater centuries ago when the streams were powerful but which now were relatively secure against flooding. In these rich upper fields the Cobbs had planted their first crops and on them built their homes. Reuben was not worried about the ultimate worth of any of his fields, and since he had reassured himself about the permanence of the Great Raft he was satisfied that his water supply was guaranteed also.

It was his slaves about which he worried, for in a distant land like Texas, where replenishment was not easy, they were of considerable value, and if he should be deprived by Northern guile, he would lose not only his investment in them but also his capacity to work his plantation. The worth of an average adult male slave in Jefferson had increased to $900, a female, to $750, and since he and Sett had brought with them only the best, their investment, forgetting the children, stood at something better than $60,000. Since the value of a good slave seemed to rise steadily, he could anticipate that with natural increase by birth, which he figured at 2.15 percent per year, and the judicious purchase of new slaves from farmers going out of business, by 1860 he and Sett ought to have no less than a hundred and fifty slaves worth more than $1,000 each. This was property worth protecting.

He was therefore most attentive when a Northern newspaper writer named Elmer Carmody arrived in Jefferson. Carmody told everyone quite frankly what he was up to: 'I'm writing a series of essays on the New South—Alabama, Mississippi, Texas . . . We already know about the Old South. But Texas is of powerful concern to Northerners.'

He talked with anyone who would pause, and showed an intelligent interest in all details of plantation life, taking careful note of financial and husbandry details. As he went about in the small town he heard repeatedly of the Cobb brothers, as they were called, for the size and ambition of their plantation excited admira-

tion: 'Mister, they have the best mill in the whole South, Old or New.' Several Jeffersonians volunteered to drive Carmody out to Lakeview, but he preferred to take things easy, and on the fifth day of his stay, Reuben Cobb did indeed drop by to see him.

'We hear you're writin' about us.'

'I propose to.'

'Unfavorable, I suspect?'

Carmody extended his right hand palm down, and rotated it, up and down, to indicate strict impartiality: 'I write as the facts fall, Mr. Cobb. And the facts I've been hearing tell me that you and your brother . . .'

'Cousin. He's from Carolina. I'm from Georgia.'

'Would I be presuming . . . ?'

'To my mind, you're presumin' by even bein' in this town. But if you want to see a plantation at its best, I'd be proud to have you ride back with me.'

Reuben was on horseback, and he naturally assumed that Carmody had a mount, and when the newspaperman confessed that he didn't, Cobb hastily arranged to borrow one from a grocer with whom he did business, and soon the pair were heading out to Lakeview.

'I hear that you have more than ten thousand acres. Why were you so willing . . . ?'

Carmody rarely had to finish a question, for Cobb had such an acute interest in everything, he could anticipate what data an intelligent man might seek. 'We believe in Texas,' he said, turning sideways. 'We're willing to invest all our savings.'

'What did the land cost you, on the average?'

Cobb was surprised; no Southerner would dream of asking such a question of a plantation owner. Forbidden were: 'How many acres?' 'How many bales?'

Next Carmody asked: 'How many bales do you hope to ship?' And before Cobb could answer, he asked: 'Is it true you have your own wharf?'

By the time they reached Lakeview, Reuben actually liked Carmody, for in his brash twenty-six-year-old way the young man asked probing questions without a shred of guile, doing so in such a rational progression that Reuben wanted to answer, and when the four adult Cobbs met with Carmody, who stayed with them three days, the conversation became extremely pointed, with Reuben asking at the beginning of the first session: 'Are you an abolitionist?' and with Carmody replying: 'I'm nothing. I look, I listen, I report.'

'And what are you goin' to report about us? Here in Texas?'

'That you arc the last gasp of profitable slavery.'

'You admit, then, that we do make profits 7 '

'You do, but not for long. And at a terrible cost to your society.'

Reuben flushed, and there might have been harsh words, for he was a voluble defender of the South and its peculiar traditions, but he also wanted to hear a logical explanation of the Northern point of view, so he restrained himself and asked: 'Why do you say our obvious profits exact a terrible cost?' and Carmody launched into a careful analysis:

'Let us suppose two recent immigrants go, one, like you, to Texas, another, also like you, to Iowa—two states that joined the Union at about the same time You each bring to your new location the same amount of cash, the same amount of intelligence and energy I'm afraid that the man who goes to Iowa will in the long run have every advantage, and the cruel difference will be that he will not be encumbered by slaves and you will.

'This difference will manifest itself in every aspect of life, but principally in two vital ways, manufacturing of goods and self-government. Let's take manufacturing first. Because the Iowa man has no slaves, he can rely on no ready crop like cotton. He must work in many different fields, and when he does he builds skills. Pretty soon everything he needs to live on is available locally. If he wants a bricklayer, he can hire one. If he wants an engineer, he can ask about the neighborhood, and soon he has produced a diversified society capable of supporting itself by the exchange of money for services.

The man who comes to Texas with his slaves cannot do that, for he must apply all his own energies and that of his slaves to growing one cash crop, cotton. Now, the profits from cotton can be great. My studies satisfy me that even a poor farmer can produce his crop for seven cents a pound. But with good management you can bring it in for five and three-quarters cents, and then, even if you have to sell at seven, you prosper, and if you can get sixteen, you make a fortune. I know that in many years you do even better. But you must buy more slaves and more land. What happens when the land gives out? Your profits are not invested in the creation of a multiple society. Now and next year and for all the years to come, when you need something, you must send to Cincinnati to find it. You are not producing those useful things upon which a complex organization depends, and down the road a way you're bound to pay a terrible price for this neglect.

'Eight or nine times during my travels I've heard sensible men say: "We may have to go to war, some day, to protect ourselves from the Yankees ... to protect our sacred way of life." And the speakers have convinced me that they mean it and that their young men are the bravest in the world. But, Mr. Cobb, if the North has all the production, all the

railroads, all the arsenals, all the shipbuilders, it must in the long run prevail, no matter how gallant your young men prove to be.

'And before you argue me down, let me say that the gravest price you pay for your slave economy is the tardiness it encourages in the building up of government, of education and of the good agencies of society. You have no public schools because half your population, the Negro half, does not need them. Your friend in Iowa will soon have libraries and publishing houses, and you will not. He will have lively politics, divided between reasonable factions, and you will have only the party dedicated to the preservation of slavery. This is the terrible cost of your peculiar institution. You ought to abandon it tomorrow.'

Each of the four Cobbs had a dozen points on which to debate Carmody's thesis, and he proved responsive to all of them, listening sagely, nodding his head agreeably when they scored and shaking it when they indulged in fantasy, not fact. He really was seeking information, and they believed him when he assured them that he was not an abolitionist: 'I truly have no preconceptions. I've studied Adam Smith and have learned from him that economy governs a great deal of human effort, and the more deeply I probe into the economy of the South . . .'

'What is this word economy?' Petty Prue asked.

'It means everything we do at work and trade. For example, the most interesting thing I've seen at Lakeview, and let me tell you, this is an impressive plantation and you're impressive people . . . No, you guess what's been most interesting.'

The Cobbs guessed that it was their manufactured lake where none had been before, their multipurpose mill, perhaps the girdling of the trees and letting them stand in the midst of the cotton. 'No,' Carmody said, 'it's that slave Trajan. He runs your mill, you know. Gin, press, grist, saw, he does it all. Frankly, he's a better mechanic than any I saw in Iowa. And you must have in these fields around Jefferson . . .' He threw his arms wide to include all this part of Texas. He had become so excited that he lost his line of reasoning; ideas cascaded through his mind with such rapidity that this sometimes happened.

'Tell me,' he said, 'is that Great Raft I saw at Shreveport, is it there forever?' When the Cobbs assured him that it was, he said: 'Remarkable. But then, a great deal in this part of the world is remarkable.'

For two more days he talked with the Cobbs, and on the evening before his departure Reuben said: 'You know so much about us, I'd like to hire you as manager,' and Carmody replied: 'You've almost convinced me that plantation life can work,' and Somerset

asked: 'But you leave here still unconvinced?' and he said: 'Yes. This way of life is doomed. Its economy must deteriorate.'

'Now, that's where you're wrong!' Reuben cried, leaping to his feet. 'If we can keep moving our slaves westward, we can maintain the paradise forever.'

Carmody stiffened, visibly, and Petty Prue wished her husband had not spoken so openly, for she knew the young visitor must respond; he was the kind who did: 'Mr. Cobb, the nation will not permit you, will never permit you, to carry your slaves even ten miles west of Texas.'

Reuben flushed and his neck muscles grew taut, whereupon Petty Prue said blithely: i've prepared a small libation in honor of your departure, Mr. Carmody/ and the tempest was avoided, but just before retiring for the night Carmody said something which caused Reuben to fall silent: 'Up on the Red River, I met this Methodist preacher, man named Hutchinson, not a very good preacher, if you ask me, in the pulpit I mean, but a man of profound wisdom. He told me that he's been teaching slaves in that district to read and figure, and he's found that some of them were distinctly clever.'

On the day that Elmer Carmody left Jefferson, Reuben Cobb and two neighbors rode north to the Red River, a distance of only sixty miles to the Indian Territory, and there they made quiet inquiry as to the comings and goings of this Methodist minister Hutchinson. When they had him well spotted, they enlisted the aid of several local plantation owners, and in the dark of night they apprehended the lanky, weepy-eyed man and tied him to a tree. Warning him that if he continued preaching insurrection to slaves in the district, they would kill him next time, they then lashed him till he fainted. Leaving him tied to the tree, they returned to their homes.

Just before Christmas 1850, the Cobbs met General Yancey Quimper, and were at first impressed by the man's bearing and his obvious patriotism, although they differed as to the amount of support they wished to give him. Reuben, always on the hair trigger where Southern rights were concerned and looking far forward in his defense of slavery, thought that Quimper made a great deal of sense in his opposition to Henry Clay's notorious Compromise of 1850, which restricted the spread of slavery, and he supported Quimper with special vigor when the general objected to the part of the compromise which delineated the boundaries of Texas.

'Look at this map, what they did to us,' Quimper cried as he

explained how Congress had stolen immense areas of land from what should have been Texas. 'We won all this territory from Mexico, won it with our guns.'

'Is it true that you led the infantry at San Jacinto?' Somerset asked.

'Most powerful sixteen minutes in the history of Texas,' Quimper said, in those flaming minutes we won all this land, and now Congress takes it away.'

His map was compelling, for it showed the original Republic of Texas in 1836, bordered on the west by the Rio Crande in such a way that Santa Fe was part of Texas, and there was also a panhandle which stretched all the way into what would later become the states of Colorado and Wyoming, encompassing much of the good land of New Mexico and Oklahoma, if we'd of kept this,' Quimper stormed, 'we'd of been one of the major nations of the world.'

Somerset tried to placate him: 'General, you forget that Congress paid us ten million dollars for our rights.'

'No honest Texian would ever sell his birthright for a mess of potatoes.'

'We call ourselves Texans now. The old days are gone.'

'Ah-ha!' Reuben cried. 'Did you hear that, General? First time my cousin used we when speakin' of Texas. Always before it was you, like he was a visitor here.'

i feel myself to be part of Texas,' Sett confessed, 'and while I can't see the other states allowing us to hold all that land, especially up in the North, I do think we ought to have had the upper reaches of the Rio Grande as our western boundary.'

'Exactly!' Quimper shouted. 'Then we'd have Santa Fe as a counterbalance to El Paso.' With a broad and generous hand he gave away Colorado and Wyoming, but with hungry fingers he drew Santa Fe back into the Texas orbit.