The First Assassin

FOUR

THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 1861

“This man is gonna help us, Lucius! It can feel it! All the slaves been talkin’ about it!”

Lucius looked at the short woman standing before him in the foyer. She was trying to speak in a soft voice but could not keep from raising it. This was Nelly, the neighborhood busybody. She had come from next door to borrow a cup of sugar. She was always doing that. Lucius doubted that she really needed the sugar. She just wanted to talk.

“I tell you again, Lucius: he’s gonna to help us!”

“How’s he gonna to do that?”

“He’s gonna to come down here and free us! Why else would all the white folks be so upset? I’ve lived through a bunch of these presidents, Lucius, and sometimes the white folks get upset about them. But they ain’t never been upset like they upset now. This is a whole new kind of upset!”

“Lower your voice!” said Lucius in a sharp whisper. He turned to look at the staircase leading upstairs, as if he expected Bennett to come down and scold him for listening to Nelly’s nonsense. He knew his master was waiting for a guest who would arrive soon.

Lucius was used to Nelly’s nattering. She seemed to know everybody on the Battery-and everything, too. Nelly had opinions on most subjects and enjoyed sharing them with anyone who at least would pretend to listen. It always amazed Lucius how she talked with such certainty about things she could not possibly know. Today it seemed as if she had sat in on a dining-room conversation with the Lincolns the night before.

“He’s gonna to help us, Lucius,” said Nelly again. “Hear me now. That man Lincoln is gonna to come down here and let our people go, like Moses did to Pharaoh.”

“What makes you think a white will ever care enough about a black to do that?”

“Lucius, I know of whites right here in Charleston who would free the slaves.”

“You’re crazy, Nelly.”

“I ain’t fibbin’.”

“Maybe Lincoln is a good man. But there ain’t a single white person in Charleston who cares about the slaves, except to make sure they do what they’re told.”

“Have you heard of the Underground Railroad?”

“Of course, Nelly. Don’t say it so loudly.”

“There’s a station right here in Charleston.”

“That ain’t true.”

“Lemme tell you something, Lucius-”

A hard knock came from the front door.

“Nelly, you gotta go now.”

“I’ll slip down the hall. You get the door and I’ll come back.”

The knocker pounded again, this time more urgently. Lucius sensed impatience on the other side. He raised his eyebrows. “Go, Nelly,” he said. “You know where the sugar’s at. Get some and get outta here.”

The knocker banged against the door again, even harder than before. Lucius started for it. He placed his hand on the knob and looked over his shoulder to where Nelly had been standing. At last she was gone. Sometimes the only way to make her leave was to send her on her way. Lucius turned the knob and opened the door.

A man stood on the porch, his hand raised as if he were about to knock again. It was getting dark outside, but Lucius recognized the caller immediately. This was Tucker Hughes, a familiar face in recent weeks. He stepped inside without an invitation, brushing against the slave’s shoulder. Lucius wondered why he had even bothered to knock. Before he could ask for Hughes’s hat, it was shoved at him. “Is he upstairs?” inquired Hughes.

After a lifetime in servitude, Lucius had become accustomed, even numb, to the dozens of little indignities he suffered each day. But for some reason the behavior of Hughes gnawed at him. Over the last year or two, Bennett had taken a fatherly interest in Hughes and treated him almost as a surrogate son. Hughes was a frequent caller when Bennett stayed in Charleston. He had come by every few days since the middle of January.

Hughes raised his eyebrows. “Is he upstairs?” he asked again, this time enunciating the words as if he were speaking to a half-wit.

The nasty tone snapped Lucius out of his thoughts. “Yessir, Mr. Hughes, and I can take you-”

Before Lucius could get the words out of his mouth, Hughes turned toward the steps and started up. Lucius tossed the hat on a chair and sprang after him.

This treatment perturbed the slave. It was not merely the rudeness. He was used to rudeness from white folks. It was the total disregard for the role Bennett had assigned Lucius to play in this house. Lucius should lead Hughes upstairs and announce his presence. If Hughes just barged in, Bennett would think Lucius was not doing his job. The slave would look bad and Hughes would have gained nothing. It was supremely inconsiderate.

Lucius wanted Bennett to think well of him. He had lived with Bennett almost his entire life. They were born the same summer at the Bennett plantation. Lucius’s mother had looked after both of them during their early years, and they played together in the rough egalitarianism of childhood. But it could not last forever-not when one of them was white and the other black. Bennett’s father, Richard, separated the boys around Langston’s seventh birthday. Lucius became a full-time slave hand. Bennett’s father introduced his son to the life of a plantation owner. In the mornings, a tutor taught him grammar, history, and arithmetic. In the afternoons, the overseers showed him how to manage a team of slaves in the field. In the evenings, Lucius would lose sleep when he heard the groans of fellow slaves who had been whipped that day by Langston. The boys rarely spoke to each other then, and they certainly never traded words about the past. Sometimes their eyes would meet and exchange a knowing look, but in a moment it vanished. They had their separate roles.

One day, when Lucius was about fifteen, he walked by an open window at the Bennett manor and heard the familiar voice of Langston arguing with his father. Eavesdropping was a skill that slaves honed to perfection, and Lucius decided to listen.

“I won’t do it, Father! I cannot!”

“Langston, he is a slave and you are his master. There can be no favorites on a plantation. You must set aside whatever childish feelings you once had for him from what your responsibilities are today.”

“You are asking me to punish Lucius for no reason-for a reason I am to invent! This test you have devised for me is not fair to him!”

The boy was shouting, but his father replied with cool insistence.

“Langston, you are becoming a man, and you must bury those sentiments. They do not befit a member of our class.”

“No, Father, I cannot do it-and I will not do it!”

Lucius heard footsteps stomping across the floor followed by the slam of a door. He decided he had better get on his way when he heard the elder Bennett mutter something to himself. The words were hard to make out, but Lucius thought he could hear them well enough: “If that’s how you’re going to be, Langston, then there’s only one way to deal with the problem.”

A week later, Lucius was sold to another plantation ten miles away. The night he arrived, an overseer led him into the fields, where two other overseers waited in the darkness. They beat him senseless. “Just breakin’ you in, boy,” said one of them. Lucius crawled back to the slave shanties when it was done. The overseers knocked him around the next night too, and the one after that. The beatings grew more sporadic over time, but they never stopped-and they rarely occurred for a reason.

The abuse went on for years. Lucius grew into manhood, but he wondered how long he could hold up. During the day, he was forced to work harder than ever before. He had managed to escape whippings at the Bennett farm. At his new home, with its owner in Charleston most of the time, the overseers had the run of the place. They were cruel men. Lucius felt the lash constantly. He believed the overseers had it in for him. He believed he was a marked man. There were other slaves who were more resistant to authority, and some who did not work very hard. Lucius thought he was the only one to be singled out for torture.

Not once was he given a pass to visit his mother, who still lived on the Bennett farm. Slaves who had close kin nearby routinely earned this privilege. Lucius thought about running away, but he was kept in such a state of exhaustion and pain that he did not consider himself capable. He figured he would be caught and beaten worse than ever before. Was it really worth going on this way?

Lucius decided it was not. He resolved to end it all. One day, he positioned himself alone in the fields, away from where the other slaves were working. It was sure to attract the attention of an overseer. By the middle of the morning, it had. One of them started walking in his direction. Lucius thrust his hand into an overgrown patch of weeds, and his fingers grasped the handle of a butcher knife he had stashed there. As the man approached, Lucius thought to himself, This is going to be easy.

The overseer stopped about twenty feet away from where Lucius crouched. Instead of hurling insults at the slave and demanding that he move into the other field, he just stood there for a moment. He was not even holding his whip. This confused Lucius.

“If you think I wanna beat the life out of you, boy,” sneered the overseer, “you’d be right.”

Lucius tightened his grip on the knife. Just take a few steps this way, he thought. The overseer needed to come a little closer before Lucius could pounce.

“But I’m not gonna,” said the overseer. “It’s your lucky day, boy. Follow me.”

He turned around and started walking to the manor. His back was to Lucius. He seemed completely unaware that the slave presented any kind of threat. Perhaps this was the time to strike. But now Lucius was curious. He looked down at the knife. It will cut just as well tomorrow, he thought. He hid it and followed the man whose life he had spared.

A few minutes later, he stood in front of the manor. The overseer told him that he had been sold.

“You’re going back to Bennett’s,” said the overseer. “I think you’re worthless, but they must want you bad. I hear you fetched a high price. They must wanna rough you up too-when you came over here a few years back, old Mr. Bennett insisted that we beat you as much as we pleased and then some.”

The overseer said all this with a smile on his face. Lucius hated him for that. For a fleeting moment, he wished he still had the knife in his hand. “Here’s a pass to their place. You have to be there by sundown. You know the way,” said the overseer. “Now get out of my sight!”

Lucius collected a few belongings. Then he walked back to the home he had not seen for years. That evening, as he reacquainted himself with familiar faces that had grown several years older, he learned the news: Richard Bennett had died two weeks earlier. His son Langston was running the plantation.

These memories flashed through Lucius’s mind as he followed Tucker Hughes up the stairs. He was determined to catch the younger man.

Bennett had treated Lucius very well as the years passed into decades. He had let Lucius start a family, gave him a prestigious job inside the plantation house, and now rarely traveled anywhere without his favorite servant. Lucius once heard it said that the art of being a slave is to rule one’s master. He knew that nobody ruled Bennett, but he also believed that he had achieved a position of reasonable comfort. He doubted that someone who was not white could have a better life in the South. At the same time, he privately shared Nelly’s hope that his whole race might be free one day. He wanted that for his grandchildren more than himself. He never said such a thing, of course. Not even to Nelly.

The urgency of the moment again intruded on these thoughts. Hughes was about to enter the study.

“Please, Mr. Hughes! Let me!” said Lucius.

Hughes looked up irritably but took a step back. Lucius nodded to him-a thank-you that was not heartfelt-and opened the door. Inside, Bennett looked up. Piles of books and newspapers cluttered the room. Both Lucius and Hughes knew that Bennett was a voracious reader. He read almost every word in every issue of the Charleston Mercury and De Bow’s Review plus several other periodicals. He even used to get Harper’s Weekly, which was published in New York. Yet the local bookshops stopped carrying it when it printed pictures of Lincoln.

“Mr. Hughes is here, sir.”

Hughes entered the room, arms outstretched. “Langston,” he said, with a big grin on his face.

The men exchanged greetings. Hughes eventually took a seat and picked up a book on a table beside him. He flipped to the title page: The War in Nicaragua, written by William Walker and published by S. H. Goetzel amp; Co. in Mobile. On the facing page, a picture of Walker made him look harmless, even effeminate. It was hard to believe this man had led a small army of American adventurers into Nicaragua and had briefly become the little country’s president.

“It’s surprising how photographs are appearing everywhere,” said Hughes.

“It may be a passing fancy,” grunted Bennett. “I’ve never had mine taken.”

“Really? We have to do something about that.” Hughes continued to flip through the pages of the Walker book. “Are we mentioned in here?”

“Fortunately not.”

The light in the room brightened. Hughes looked up to see Lucius adjusting an oil lamp.

“It arrived last fall, around the time of Walker’s death,” said Bennett. “He wrote it to raise money for that final expedition-the one that killed him.”

“I was sorry to hear what had happened,” said Hughes.

“There was a time when you and I believed he held promise. His success might have changed recent events for the better. If some part of Spanish America had been integrated into the Union, we might have averted this whole secession crisis.”

“We did what we could. Yet we were foolish to think the Northern states would ever permit a filibuster like Walker to succeed in one of his conquests-and let Nicaragua, Cuba, or any part of Mexico into the Union as a slaveholding state. I am coming to believe the North actually wants this calamity.”

Hughes set the book back on the table where he had found it. “How exactly did he die? All I heard was that he was executed.”

“The Brits caught him in Honduras plotting a new incursion. They handed him over to the locals, who put him in front of a firing squad.” Bennett lowered his voice. “After they had riddled his body with bullets, the captain walked over to his slumped form, placed the barrel of his musket in Walker’s face, and pulled the trigger. The shot obliterated his features.”

The image made Hughes cringe. “You might have spared me that detail,” he said, shifting around in his chair. He noticed the pleasure Bennett seemed to take from his discomfort.

“Today, of course, I’m much less interested in the events occurring outside our borders than those occurring within them,” said Bennett.

So now it was down to business, thought Hughes. Bennett seemed uncommonly serious this evening.

“Lucius, would you please excuse us? I’ll call if we need anything.”

The slave left and closed the door. Alone in the room with Bennett now, Hughes stood up. He found that pacing made it easier to think.

“Tucker, do you seriously think we can win a war against the North?”

Bennett knew the answer to that question, thought Hughes. They had debated it plenty of times before. It was a rather famous disagreement between the two of them. Why raise it now?

“My opinion on that has not changed, Langston. The South may prevail. We have better leaders, and we will fight a defensive war in protection of our homes and our ways. That gives us a significant advantage.”

“Your ideas on that are thoughtful,” said Bennett, “even though they are wrong.” He paused to let that comment sink in. “Open warfare is exactly the wrong approach. The men now aiming cannons across the water at Fort Sumter are hotheads. They are ready to fire, and they have not given any consideration to whether Virginia will secede, whether they can secure agreements with the border states, or whether they can make treaties with foreign nations. They will act, then think-rather than think, then act.”

Hughes had heard this before too. Their discussion this evening was like attending a play he had already seen several times. He knew how it would end. Yet Bennett seemed to want to go over the same ground another time. When would the old man ever broach the subject of inheritance? He had no heir-not even a relative. Everybody in Charleston thought he would name Hughes as the main beneficiary of his estate. But so far, he had not. Hughes had hoped tonight might be the night. Then again, this hope seized him every time Bennett summoned him for a visit. Time to return to the script, he thought. I have a part to play.

“Perhaps this business with Sumter is a welcome development,” said Hughes. As he strolled around the room, he spotted some correspondence sitting on a table near Bennett. He immediately wanted to read it. “We’ve known for years that preserving our institutions may require war. Better to strike a blow for our freedom and our culture now than to curl up and let Lincoln destroy them over time and on his terms.”

Bennett shook his head. “That fight cannot be won against the Northerners, at least not in the way you imagine. They have men, money, and material on their side. They are manufacturers. They have a navy. We are an agricultural people. We have rice, sugar, and cotton. It is not enough to win a war. We must consider other options. I want to do something for South Carolina, Tucker-one last thing before my days are done. I want to strike one final blow for the whole South.”

This is new, thought Hughes. Bennett had not hinted at a specific plan of action before. “You puzzle me,” said Hughes, stepping leisurely to the table. Bennett’s back was to him. “One moment you sound like a conciliator who wants to avoid war. The next you say you want to do something for the South. I hope that what you intend to do is something besides giving up.”

“I will never surrender,” sputtered Bennett. “There can be no compromise on the slavery question. We cannot live under politicians whose idea of democracy is that when three people get together, the two shall rule the one. Our institutions must survive. It is our right that they do. And therefore, we must aim directly at the heart of Black Republican rule.”

Hughes was struck by the old man’s passion, but his mind was on the table. “War must be considered,” he said, angling for a view of the papers. “If we show the North we are willing to fight, it may acquiesce.”

Making sure Bennett could not see him, Hughes leaned over the table. A letter on top read, “Su espanol es bueno, pero mi ingles es mejor. Your offer is generous. I would like to meet in person to discuss it. Expect me in Charleston by the middle part of April.” The letter was not signed.

Hughes could not read the first part, but he knew it was written in Spanish. Did Bennett have some unmentioned relation in Cuba? The thought worried him.

“But it may come to bloodshed,” said Bennett.

“Yes, it may,” said Hughes, returning to his seat. “And if it does, we will have to fight. Even if we lose, we may preserve our honor. But I think we may very well win a war.”

Bennett said nothing for a moment. He appeared to be collecting his thoughts. Then he stared directly at Hughes and narrowed his eyes. “Let’s talk of your inheritance, and how it may help us achieve our goals.”

Hughes slanted forward. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t want a war.”

“I know that.”

“I want a death. I want a murder.”

Hughes sat up sharply. “What are you talking about, Langston?”

“I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln.”

In the darkened hallway outside, Lucius pulled his ear back from the door. The sound coming from within was muffled, but Lucius was certain of what he had heard. Without making a sound, he walked to the steps and crept downstairs. He was glad Nelly was not waiting for him.