Chapter 19

T he clock in Frederick Douglass' parlor chimed twelve. All over Rochester, clocks were striking twelve. Douglass raised a glass of wine to his wife and son. "Happy New Year," he said solemnly.

"Happy New Year, Frederick," Anna Douglass said, and drank. "When I was young, I never reckoned I'd live to see such a big number as

1882."

"May you see many more new years, Mother," Lewis Douglass said.

"You're not drinking, son." Frederick Douglass had emptied his own glass, and was reaching for the decanter to refill it.

"No, I'm not," Lewis said, "for the year ahead looks none too happy to me."

"Compare it to the year just past," Douglass said. "When seen from that perspective, how can it fail of being a happy year?"

Lewis gravely considered that. He showed the result of the consideration not by words but by downing the wine in front of him in a couple of quick gulps. When Douglass held out the decanter, he poured his glass full again, too. "Compared to the year just past, any year save perhaps 1862 would seem happy."

Anna cocked her head to one side, listening to bells ringing un-constrainedly and to firecrackers and pistols and rifles going off in the street, some quite close by. "It don't sound the way it ought to," she said.

"It doesn't, does it?" Douglass said. "Something's missing."

Lewis supplied the deficiency: "No cannon this year. No cannon, by order of the mayor and the governor and whichever soldier makes the most noise around these parts. They all fear the British gunboats out on the lake will mistake the celebration for an attack on themselves and use it as a pretext for bombarding the city. A happy new year indeed, is it not?"

"They might do it, too," Douglass said gloomily. "They might enjoy doing it, the better to coerce the president into yielding to their demands."

"He might as well," Anna said. "Things ain't gwine get no better on account of he don't. They done licked us, so they gets to tell us what to do."

Anna's grammar was not all it should have been. That did not make what she said any less true. Lewis must have thought as much, for he said, "Mother, we ought to send you to Washington, because you sec these things a lot more plainly than President Blaine is able to."

"What Blaine can see and what he can do are liable to be two different propositions," Douglass said, regretting every word of defense he spent on the man who had had the best chance since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to do something about the Confederate States-had it and squandered it. "He's made his bed, and now-"

"And now the whole country has to lie in it," Lewis broke in. He reached for the wine decanter once more, then yanked his hand away. Bitterness filled his voice as he went on, "I'd get drunk, but what's the use? Things wouldn't be any better when I sobered up again."

"Well, I don't aim to get myself drunk any which way," Anna Douglass said. "It's a sinful thing to go and do. What I aim to do is go to bed." She struggled to her feet. " Frederick, you'll help me up the stairs."

"Of course I will, my dear." Douglass rose, too. His body still responded readily to his will. He helped his wife up to the bedroom, helped her out of her dress and corset, and made sure she was comfortable before he went back down to talk with his son a while longer.

Lewis was taking short, quick, furious puffs on a cigar when Frederick Douglass came back to the parlor. "What's the use, Father?" he asked as Douglass sat down once more. "What in God's name is the use? Why don't we all pack up and move to Liberia? We might accomplish something there."

"You may, if you like," Douglass answered evenly. "I've thought about it once or twice-maybe more than once or twice." His son stared at him. He nodded, his face grave. "Oh, yes, I've thought about it. In Liberia, the pond is so small as to make me-or you, should you ever choose to go-a very large fish indeed, which cannot help but feed a man's pride. But if I left, I should be giving up the fight here, and as much as proving the Confederates right when they say the black man cannot compete equally against the white. Every column I write here shows the CSA to be founded on a lie. How could I do the same in Africa?"

Lewis did not answer right away. He took the cigar from his mouth and sat for some time staring at the glowing coal. Then, savagely, he stubbed out the cigar. "Well, you're right," he said. "I wish to heaven you weren't, but you are." He got up and clapped Douglass on the shoulder. "Happy New Year, Father. You were right about that, too. Set next to the one we've escaped, the year ahead can't be so bad. Good night. You needn't get up-rest easy."

Douglass rested easy. He heard his son take his overcoat off the tree in the front hall, put it on, open the door, and close it after him. Bells on the carriage jingled as Lewis drove home. Douglass looked at the decanter of wine. Like a voyage to Liberia, it tempted him. But, ever since his escape from slavery, he had seldom run away, and he had never been a man who drank alone. Picking up the cut-glass stopper, he set it in its place. Then, with a grunt, he rose once more and went off to bed. He listened to clocks striking one. He expected he would also listen to them striking two, but drifted off before they did.

Other than having a new calendar, 1882 seemed little different from the vanished 1881. Warships flying the Union Jack remained outside Rochester harbor, as they did outside other U.S. harbors along the Great Lakes. No warships flying the Stars and Stripes came out to challenge them. That sprang in part from the cease-fire, but only in part. The rest was that the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes flotilla was incapable of challenging its British counterpart.

One day in the middle of January, the War Department announced that the troops of the Army of the Ohio were returning to U.S. soil. By the way the announcement sounded, no one would have guessed it meant the U.S. Army was abandoning the last foothold it held in Kentucky. The telegram made the move sound like a triumph.

"Look at this!" Douglass waved the announcement in his son's face. "Look at this. How many dead men in Louisville? They won't be coming back to Indiana. And for what did they die? For what, I ask you?"

"For President Blaine's ambition," Lewis answered. "Nothing else." The abject failure of the U.S. war effort had left him even more estranged from and cynical about the society in which he lived than he had been before the fighting started.

But Douglass shook his head. "The cause for which we fought was noble," he insisted, as he had insisted all along. "The power of the Confederate States should have been kept from growing. The tragedy was not that we fought, but that we fought while so manifestly unprepared to fight hard. Blaine gets some of the blame for that, but the Democrats who kept us so weak for so long must share it with him. If we are to have a return engagement with the Confederacy, we must be more ready in all respects. I see no other remedy."

"I never thought I'd live to see the day when you and Ben Butler were proposing the same cure for our disease," Lewis said. "The Democrats like him, too."

That brought Douglass up short. Butler had no more kept silent about the proposals he had made in the meeting at the Florence Hotel outside Chicago than Abraham Lincoln had about his. Both men were stirring up turmoil all through the battered country, and each one's followers violently opposed the other's. As Lincoln had joined with the Socialists, so Butler was indeed drifting back toward the Democrats, from whose ranks he had deserted during the War of Secession.

Reluctantly, Douglass said, "An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it."