Full of Eyes, page 27
He had been enjoined in no uncertain terms by the pastor that he was expected to deliver a talk denouncing abolitionism and defending the Southerner’s right to own slaves, preferably using Holy Scripture to bolster his argument.
Antoine did not defend slavery in his sermon. He was my dear friend by then but we became even closer after he told the full house and the slave gallery that the possibility existed that God was allowing the South to be afflicted with the impending war because the people had embraced this uncharitable and greed-driven convention. He urged the South to disclaim slavery as a way of life.
“If that seems too much—and it may be too much at this juncture, brethren—then at least resolve in your hearts to treat your slaves as fellow human beings. Look for Jesus Christ in each one of them.”
After mass, Antoine told me of the enormity of his decision to condemn slavery, and its consequences.
“Slavery is a great evil, Thomas. We southerners should never have allowed plantation owners to import the poor African to make the owner rich with inexpensive labor. The Church should never have gone along with this blight on our society. It is plain wrong to own other people, and it has always been wrong. I hoped, along with Bishop Lynch, that it would die out on its own. It probably would have, were it not for the war that will envelop us soon. Now it will not be allowed to die a natural death. Win or lose, the South and slavery will have changed for the worse. If we win and gain freedom from northern oppression, then slavery will be imbued with new vigor. Many here and in the North think that this war will be fought over slavery. The Confederates will be loath to abandon it with victory, especially if many of our young men die fighting for it.
“If we lose the war, the North will terminate slavery in an instant, and we will also lose forever that marvelous bond of manners between the Negro and the white man of the South. Either way, either if he is further subjugated or if he is summarily freed without adequate preparation for freedom, the Negro loses. And we are culpable under God for having subdued him for so long.”
That turned out to be the last extensive conversation Antoine Gagnon, and I had before the winds of war blew our world into confusion and chaos. Knowing that he could no longer continue to serve under Monsignor Reed after his defiant sermon on Pentecost, Father Gagnon petitioned Bishop Lynch to permit him to return to his religious congregation in New Orleans. The bishop could hardly refuse.
With Antoine Gagnon off to Louisiana, I was left alone with my thoughts about slavery and my slave-owning bishop. Less than 500,000 of the five million or so white Southerners owned slaves in 1861, so preserving the institution for the sake of profits was probably not the main reason 90 percent of white southerners fought to keep slavery. It was more a matter of preserving the culture of the South, in my mind, and Bishop Lynch was deep into the culture of his diocese. And, the bishop was at least as persuasive in defending his slave-holdings as Antoine was in calling slavery a great evil.
The indignity of the market in humanity that Antoine and I witnessed stayed in my mind as spring turned into bloody summer. I prayed then that the coming war would allow me enough quiet time to further consider my own final decision on the matter.
Epilogue
B
y that feast of Pentecost, 1861, Gretchen Becknell had been remanded to the county gaol, and Andrew Quillery was placed under house arrest. James Moseley was investigating his slavery dealings and the preacher man’s participation in the concealment of the murder, as an accessory after the fact. The arrest may have saved Quillery’s life, as well. Many Charlestonians became aware of his anti-secessionist leanings by then. Most thought they were fueled by his enormously profitable slave-trading enterprise. A united North and South would have kept the profit margin high for someone who was willing to skirt the law to buy slaves whose value had cheapened where abolitionist sentiments were strong and sell them in the pro-slavery South. A war between the states would not only make the trade impossible to conduct, but a northern victory would end it all together.
If the preacher man was in danger of being lynched by a partisan mob, it never seemed to matter to him. He did not recover from the loss of Gretchen and became a sort of eccentric hermit. He stopped preaching all together, although people occasionally caught him strolling along narrow city streets, oblivious to the bedlam of war and talking animatedly to himself with wild gestures and facial contortions that frightened children.
Gretchen escaped hanging because of her gender, but she did not ever surface in Charleston again. She went to prison, and we all lost track of her after that. The years immediately following her arrest were times of great turmoil in our city and in our diocese, so the murder of Jamieson Carter lost its impact in the whirl of thousands of other stories of life and death.
Jamieson’s daughter Annie never did make up for the loss of reputation that her family’s name suffered because of her father’s affair and her own dabbling in treason. Her mother stayed on to live out a spare aristocratic old age in the Carter home on one of the narrow cobbled lanes south of Broad. The house seemed to crumple and disintegrate along with her. Carter Chandlery went belly up, partly because of the Union blockade that restricted shipping from the Port of Charleston. The Carter children stayed in Charleston to work, except for Annie. She migrated upland twenty miles to the former summer colony now called Somerville. She eventually married a veteran of Vicksburg and raised a family, but was never again a factor in the mercantile life of the Lowcountry. She and her children did become prominent participants in the Catholic parish of the area. Her husband was a casual Presbyterian who took to drink and atheism late in life. Annie forgave him his excesses, telling her pastor that he woke from a nightmare one black night and confessed what had been affecting his dreams for the past ten years.
He had killed and eaten his favorite hunting dog in Mississippi, the one who had followed him into combat and stayed by his side. He told his wife on that dark night of his feverish dreams that both of them would have starved if he hadn’t done it, but the need for it took some of his faith away. That is what Annie thought.
Former police chief Gordon Becknell had developed a serious infection by the time Civil War battles began in earnest and was suddenly doing poorly. The sisters told Bishop Lynch that they feared it was systemic in nature, and Becknell did eventually die from his Devil’s Hole wounds.
In Charleston, a great fire, thought by some to have been begun by Yankee saboteurs, swept from one side of the peninsula to the other just a few weeks after Pentecost 1861. Except for the attack on Fort Sumter, there had been no real war action by that time. But the fiery disaster gave us an inkling of what was to come. Among the many victims of the fire was the grand cathedral on Broad Street, Sts. John and Finbar.
If Bishop Patrick Lynch was distressed by the loss of his diocesan church, he was to become used to the feeling and had, in any case, many other things to occupy his mind. He became the leading secessionist cleric in the South, actively defending the cause and supporting the Confederate Army with speeches, fundraising, spiritual ministry to the soldiers and with the nursing hospitals run by the nuns of the diocese. He organized the defense of many of the diocesan schools and convents from Yankee marauders late in the war, although he was unable to save the Ursuline Convent in Columbia from Sherman’s army, where his own sister was the abbess.
When I took out Antoine’s poem/prayer about the wheedling wind, which I did so often that it finally became worn through, but by then I’d memorized it, I thought not only about my courageous friend but also of my own failings. I still had not decided what stance to take on slavery two years later. By then, the Union army had suffered many defeats, including a devastating one at Fredericksburg. People in the South were beginning to talk of Lincoln suing for peace. No matter if the Confederacy was successful or not, I had to decide morally on the issue of slavery. I knew that full well at the time. I can tell you now, however, that before I made up my mind, Father Antoine Gagnon entered my life again to help me decide. He came because we had more criminalist work to do for the Rebel Bishop.
Author’s Note
Unpopular because of his arrogant ways in the final years of his reign as Bishop of Charleston, the Most Reverend Ernest L. Unterkoefler, known as the German Shepherd, was at least an ardent advocate of civil rights and a true friend of people of color. When he finally left this vale of tears for his eternal reward after a twenty-five year tenure (1965-1990), he refused, in his will, to be entombed in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in the city of Charleston. The alleged reason was that he did not want his body to rest in the company of one of his predecessors, Bishop Patrick N. Lynch.
For Bishop Lynch was a slave owner and, although he was ultimately much more substantive and important a character than that, it was this one failing that possessed the prodigious mind of Unterkoefler. Whether or not the burial story is apocryphal, Unterkoefler certainly felt no affection for Lynch, and Bishop Unterkoefler’s mortal remains are not with those of the rest of the deceased Catholic bishops of South Carolina.
A spin-off of that dislike is that the diocesan archives were closed through the 1970s and 1980s for all practical purposes to research about nineteenth century Catholics in the South. There are many other sources, of course, but letters and articles, an actual commission to Lynch from Jefferson Davis, early diocesan newspaper clips—all were unavailable for a long time.
When David B. Thompson’s episcopacy replaced Unterkoefler’s in 1990, however, it began with an infusion of light and air into the hidden life of Patrick Lynch. When I was able to read about him and episcopal life during the Civil War, I was captivated. This novel began as a profile I did for Catholic Heritage on Lynch, who, as I mentioned in the text, was called “The Rebel Bishop” by no less a character himself than Horace Greeley. So, I’m grateful to Bishop Thompson for opening up a whole new field of interest for me.
This story is fictional, although some of the recognizable characters are drawn true-to-life namely Jefferson Davis, General Beauregard, Major Anderson, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Pierre Toussaint, Bishop John England, and, of course, Bishop Lynch. Most of the characters in this book are fictional and are not meant to represent anyone living or dead. That includes the narrator, Father Tom Dockery, his friend Jesuit Father Antoine Gagnon, and his pastor Monsignor Reed. St. Mary of the Annunciation is a real church, standing proudly to this day on Hasell Street, but she never was administered by anyone named Reed—or any other pro-slavery pastor, as far as I know. Bones and the police chiefs are all fictional, as are Gretchen, Moseley, Mrs. Ryan, and even Andrew Quillery himself. I made up all the secondary characters out of whole cloth as well.
Devil’s Hole is not real, but the slave parish at Catholic Hill is. The attack of Ft. Sumter is fairly portrayed. The sermon given by Bishop Lynch in chapter five was made up, but the historical discussion that followed is based on fact.
The history, the places, and the cultures depicted are done so accurately. For instance, at the behest of his friend Jefferson Davis, the Rebel Bishop ran the Unionist blockade on the Minerva and sailed to Rome on the open deck of that boat in 1864. He was there, trying to persuade Pope Pius IX to recognize the Confederate States of America, when Lee finally surrendered at Appomattox. Bishop Patrick Lynch endured the ignominy of having to swear allegiance to the Union at the American Legation House before being allowed to return to his diocese.
He then spent another lifetime rebuilding that Diocese of Charleston and paying off most of the enormous debts the Catholic Church in South Carolina had incurred through the war years—some $360,000 worth. He died after serving as Bishop of Charleston for twenty-four years, until 1882.
His house slave, Flora, was also real. The rumor was rampant that Bishop Lynch had originally purchased her to save her from the mistreatment of her former master. Lynch had, after all, paid more than $800 for her when she was already middle-aged and partially crippled—but verification never came from her or the bishop, as far as we know.
Also, the episcopal residence on Broad Street is real and elegant even today, but the Diocese of Charleston probably did not purchase it until 1868.
Some additional tidbits that the amateur historian might enjoy include:
John Forsyth, the former governor of Georgia, was secretary of state in the administration of Martin Van Buren when he accused the pope of being an abolitionist. Forsyth was undoubtedly thinking of his upcoming election challenge from General William H. Harrison, a Whig who favored the continuation of slavery. Pope Gregory XVI’s apostolic brief condemned the trade in slaves and was thought by some to infer a condemnation of the practice of slavery itself. Forsyth argued that the pope’s brief made him, in effect, an abolitionist. Abolitionists were generally conceded to be anti-Catholic at the time (1820s). John England must have resented Forsyth’s electioneering at the pope’s expense.
Bedford Forrest rose from private to lieutenant general, the only man in the War to do so. He was wounded four different times and had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him in four years of successful campaigning. The cavalry officer also had thirty confirmed kills in hand-to-hand combat before he surrendered his troops in Alabama. He became famous for his statement that he was “a horse ahead at the close.”
A new church at Catholic Hill was not actually built until 1898, the year after Father Daniel Berberich discovered the faith community at Catholic Crossroads, as Ritter was known then, after it had been priestless for nearly forty years.
Paul A. Barra
Reidville, 2018
About the Author
Paul A. Barra was a naval officer for five years, earning the Bronze Star with Combat “V” and the Combat Action ribbon for his work on the rivers of South Vietnam; a bartender for ten; and has been a chemistry teacher for longer yet. Barra was the senior staff writer for the Diocese of Charleston and wrote for newspapers and magazines, receiving numerous awards from the South Carolina Press Association and the Catholic Press Association. He graduated with a BS from Niagara University and an MS from Loyola University of New Orleans.
His four supplemental readers were published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008, two years before Tumblar House released his non-fiction book about the founding of a private high school, St. Joe’s Remarkable Journey. Barra’s middle-grade adventure novel, The Secret of Maggie’s Swamp, came out from Brownridge Publishing in 2012.
A Death in the Hills was short-listed for the Tuscany Prize before he signed a publishing contract with Argus Books in 2014. Argus also published his second mystery The Mekong Junkman in 2015. Astoria Nights (Black Opal Books, 2017) is his third novel.
Barra and his wife Joan have eight children and live with their dog, burro, alpacas, and chickens in Reidville, SC. Barra is currently putting the finishing touches on an historical mystery set in Charleston and featuring a real-life slaveholding bishop.
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About the Author
Paul A. Barra’s last novel, “Westfarrow Island,” published by The Permanent Press, was called “exciting” by Publishers Weekly.
PW said, in part: "The relentless action in the dual story lines keeps the reader engrossed. Barra offers it all: murder, smuggling, chase scenes, romance, and international intrigue.” It was shortlisted for the Silver Falchion award. His short story, Assignment: Sheepshead Bay, was selected for the MWA anthology “When a Stranger Comes to Town,” released by Hanover Square Press in April 2021.
Barra has had five novels published, plus a non-fiction book about the founding of a Catholic high school without diocesan approval. He is a decorated former naval officer, was a reporter for local papers and the senior staff writer for the diocese of Charleston.
Read more at Paul A. Barra’s site.
Paul A. Barra, Full of Eyes
