The Ninth Article
The customs officer at the Covington end of the bridge held Elias Caldwell's passport under a lamp and turned it over twice, because the Union's blue booklet was an uncommon sight on the southbound platform and the Confederate stamp inside it was forty years out of date. Caldwell was eighty-one. He had crossed the Ohio on this span nine times since it opened, and each crossing began the same way, with the train stopping in the middle of the river so that the wheels could be exchanged for the Southern gauge, a procedure that took forty minutes and gave every passenger time to look at the water and think about who owned which bank. The young officer, whose collar still carried the creases of its packaging, asked the purpose of his visit. Caldwell said he was going to Richmond to attend a funeral, which was true, and that he had once negotiated at Williamsport, which was a thing he almost never volunteered, but the officer's pen stopped moving and the man looked up with the expression of a schoolboy meeting a name from a textbook.
"The Williamsport Convention," the officer said. "My grandfather said it was the only sensible thing anyone did that year."
"Your grandfather was kind," Caldwell said, "and I would guess he never read the ninth article."
He had not meant to say that, and he regretted it as he said it, because the officer was already stamping the page and handing it back with a small bow, and the line behind them was growing. Caldwell returned to his seat and watched the Ohio slide by beneath the floor of the car. In 1862 he had been a lawyer from Wheeling with a bad knee and a wife in Baltimore, and he had known the river only as a thing that his clients' barges crossed. He did not think of himself as a diplomat then. The title came later, from newspapers that needed one, and by then there was nothing left for it to describe.
The business began in October, a few weeks after Sharpsburg, when Lee had gone back across the Potomac and McClellan had declined to follow him. Caldwell's cousin sat on a Senate committee, and the cousin knew a British consul in Baltimore, and the consul knew that Lord Palmerston was weighing an offer of mediation along with the French. Nobody in Washington wanted to be seen asking for it, and nobody in Richmond wanted to be seen refusing, so a private person with a plausible reason to travel in both directions was useful, and Caldwell was such a person. He carried letters in his boot and a cough from the damp. By the first week of November he had met three times with Judge Augustin Tolliver of Georgia, who represented Mr. Davis in the way a man represents his employer when the employer has not decided what he wants, and the two of them had settled into a long room above a mill at Williamsport with a stove, a decanter, and a map weighted at the corners with the judge's law books.
What Caldwell built there was a plan that he still thought was good. The Southern states would return to the Union with their legislatures intact and their senators seated. The Union would drop its confiscation acts and pay for any slave freed under a schedule that ended on the first of January 1890, with the compensation drawn from a fund that the Southern states themselves would administer, so that the planters would experience emancipation as a long mortgage held in their favor rather than a seizure. Kentucky and Missouri would vote on which flag they preferred under the eye of British observers. Caldwell had drafted the language of each article in the evenings, with his bad knee propped on a crate, and he had worked hardest on the ninth, which fixed the date of the final emancipation and forbade any state from altering the schedule by its own act. Tolliver read it three times and then read it a fourth time aloud, slowly, tapping each clause with the stem of his pipe. When he finished he said that he could carry the first eight articles to Richmond in his pocket, but that the ninth would have to be carried in his arms.
That was the closest they came. The elections in the North had gone badly for Mr. Lincoln, as everyone had predicted they would, and for ten days in November it seemed possible that the Democrats in the new Congress would force the matter on their own authority. Caldwell wrote to his wife that he could feel the thing tilting like a loaded wagon at the crest of a hill. Tolliver went to Richmond on the fourteenth with the draft in a leather case and came back on the nineteenth with a face the color of candle wax. Mr. Davis, he reported, had read the first eight articles with interest and the ninth with a silence that lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. Then he had asked whether the Union would first recognize the Confederate States as a belligerent power with the standing to sign such a document, and Tolliver had said that it would not, because recognition was the whole of what the war was about, and Mr. Davis had said that in that case there was nothing to sign.
Caldwell argued for three more days. He proposed a secret protocol, a delay of recognition until after ratification, a preamble written so loosely that each government could read it as it pleased. Tolliver listened to all of it with courtesy and finally put his hand flat on the map, over Georgia, and said that the trouble was not in Richmond. Half the men in the Confederate cabinet could have lived with the ninth article, he said, and the other half were afraid of what their neighbors would do to them if they accepted it, and the neighbors were afraid of the same thing in turn, so that the whole South stood in a circle with each man watching the man beside him. On the twenty-third Caldwell took the train north with the draft in his boot, and the stove at Williamsport was cold by the following week.
Then Lord Palmerston's government, having waited for the Americans to settle the matter themselves and seeing no sign that they would, issued its offer in December with Napoleon's concurrence, and the Union Congress, which had lost its nerve and a good part of its majority, accepted a suspension of arms in January. The Convention that followed was held in Williamsport again, in a larger building, by men who had never heard of Caldwell and who wrote nothing like his ninth article. It recognized two governments and a line, and it said nothing at all about the people who lived on the wrong side of the line, because the British observers, who wanted cotton, did not raise the subject and the Americans were too tired to insist. Slavery remained legal in the Confederacy. It would remain legal there, in one form or another, until the cotton market collapsed in the nineties and the Liverpool houses that had financed it stopped lending, and even then the abolition came in the form of a clause in a bankruptcy settlement.
The train rolled on through Kentucky, which had voted for the South in 1863 by a margin of eleven thousand and had never forgiven itself for it. Caldwell had seen the whole century arrange itself around that border like iron filings around a magnet. The Union, cut off from the cotton and the Mississippi, had put its energy into the northern rails, and it had built them to a gauge that the Confederates declined to share. The Pacific states, which owed nothing to either government, had declared themselves a republic in 1871 after the Union failed to complete a transcontinental line and the Confederacy failed to answer their letters, and they now minted their own gold dollar and collected their own tariff on the Sierra passes. Texas had gone its own way sooner. Missouri was split along the Osage like a loaf of bread. He had read, in newspapers from three capitals, about the commissions and the conferences and the small wars over water in the Arkansas valley, each of which had been described as the last, and in all of them he had found the same sentence rearranged, that the border must be fixed so that peace might be preserved. He thought that if he were a younger man he might have found it funny.
He reached Richmond in the morning. The funeral was for Augustin Tolliver's son, who had been a judge himself and who had sat on a commission that finally closed the last of the apprenticeship statutes in 1894, and the church was crowded with old Confederates in good black coats who looked at Caldwell with the wary courtesy of men meeting a rumor. Afterward, in the churchyard, an old woman with a cane stopped in front of him. She said that her father had read the ninth article in a Charleston newspaper in the winter of 1862, in the one week when the paper printed it, and that he had cut it out and kept it in his Bible until he died. She asked whether it was true that it would have worked.
Caldwell considered the question with the care he gave to all questions now that his own were mostly answered. He told her that Judge Tolliver had believed it would work, and that he himself had believed so for several years and then stopped believing it, and that lately he had begun again, though he could not say on what grounds. Then he asked her what her father had done for a living, and she said that he had owned eleven people in Beaufort County, and that he had freed none of them. Caldwell nodded slowly, and she went on past him toward the carriages, tapping her cane on the flagstones. He stayed where he was among the gravestones for a while, with his hat in one hand and the passport in the other, watching the cars of the Confederate Central roll slowly into the station beyond the wall and wondering, with no particular bitterness, how long it would take the clerk at the Covington bridge to find his way back to the textbook and look up the ninth article for himself.