• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1785 0

one not so much between what I had done and what I ought to have done as between the two halves of what I was. As it happened, I now believed, I had devoted almost every thought and every action since August to Thomas Newton. Everything about my situation in K.T. was bound up with our marriage and his desires. This had happened without my being especially aware of it and constituted what I knew of as being married. All the advice my sisters had given me about controlling or evading one’s husband I’d laughed at and dismissed as nonsensical. This day, though, all unbeknownst at the time, I had set a little space between us when I watched the race and thrilled to it and came home half pleased with myself and wholly pleased with Jeremiah. I resented my husband for not allowing me to communicate what I saw— that was the root of my resentment—but then I knew also that I could not have communicated what I saw to him, however eloquent I might be, because he hadn’t the interest or capacity or phrenological bump to be thrilled by such a thing. And part of me found him wanting for this. Thus I sat across from my husband in Louisa’s pleasant room, listening to Charles sing, watching Louisa smile at him, and glancing at my own husband, wondering whether he was the closed, dull, stiffly upright, and self-righteous person part of me seemed to see, or the pained, lonely, and worried person another part of me seemed to see. This was a breach. In the past, I had rather favored breaches between myself and others, but this breach confused and frightened me. It was a side of marriage I had forgotten I might need to endure.

Well, these feelings passed off, but Thomas was not one to discuss Frank’s and my bad conduct. He left our consciences to deal with us, and they did, in their own ways. But the loneliness of his disapproval passed off more slowly than the disapproval itself. And I wasn’t sure if I had learned my lesson.

I have to say that the next day, Jeremiah was none the worse for his adventure.

I put aside my letter to my sisters, not quite knowing what to write about Frank’s behavior. There seemed to be less and less news from K.T. that a person could tell in a way that would make it understandable.

Some days later, we in Lawrence received a reply to the letters General Lane and Governor Robinson had sent to President Pierce. It was in the form of a proclamation. Of course most people said that they weren’t a bit surprised, but of course people were, otherwise they wouldn’t have stopped to discuss and deplore so often and at such length what the President had to say. The gist of it was this: We were in the wrong and had set ourselves in defiance of the territorial laws (for example, incurring the death penalty for aiding a.slave to escape, incurring ten years of hard labor for subscribing to The Liberator) and of the territorial government (the tyrant Jones and his friends the Kickapoo Rangers). It was true that the President spoke against armed incursions from outside, but true also that he spoke against insurrections within the state and promised to protect only law-abiding citizens. It was as hard, Mrs. Bush said, to know what a law-abiding citizen was as it was to be one.

The language of the President’s proclamation was general and high-minded, saying one thing as if saying another. But it could be read by those who had the eyes to read it.

And then there was another piece of news. We heard that the Slavocrat, as Pierce got to be called, had sent along a message to the other slavocrats in the Senate describing the Free State government we’d just formed as "treason" and asking Congress to authorize the formation of a state government by the slavocrats in K.T. The President, it appeared, was resolved that Kansas would be a slave state no matter what. To think about it gave you a hot and cold and stiff feeling, all at the same time. Now everyone echoed Mrs. Bush—what happened in K.T only revealed the larger plan of the slavocrats, to bring slavery to every state and territory, every town and street, every family. That’s what slavery