Staging Ground. Leslie StaintonЧитать онлайн книгу.
faces. All of Lancaster has turned out, it appears—shopkeepers and haberdashers, ironmasters, gun makers, bankers, lawyers, teachers, women in curls and chignons, young men with tidy beards. Christopher Hager stands in their midst, eyes creased in merriment as he accepts the congratulations of his neighbors and friends. Off in a corner the stentorian Judge Hayes is holding forth about the genius loci of this hall, how it will “kindle the social affections, adding length as well as happiness to life.” That this was recently the site of the local jail and workhouse—and witness to a massacre whose notoriety persists—is momentarily forgotten.
Now the strains of Hager’s polka give way to the oom-pah-pah of a brass band, and I catch sight of a middle-aged woman swaying in time to the music. Fair-skinned and gray-eyed, she might be me. One foot taps gently against the floor. She wears a taffeta gown with a lace collar and long sleeves, and beneath it a corset and petticoats stiffened with whalebone, although she is not thinking now of the ocean life that gave rise to her fashionable silhouette. She seems oblivious to anything but her own enjoyment this night. Later she will scrawl a note in her diary—a great and attractive crowd filled Mr. Hager’s new hall, we stayed past 9:30—and in time she will buy a small volume in which to record her impressions of the plays she sees here.
Her boots are damp from the rain outside. When the band pauses, she can hear the thrum of water against the windowpanes. The sound pulls her briefly out of her reverie, and she thinks back to this afternoon, to the small leather case she received from the Daguerrian Gallery on Queen Street. The studio opened in May, but it was not until last week that she ventured to sit for her picture, curiosity finally conquering fear. The camera operator had put her head in a vise, and she’d sat for three minutes, unsmiling, while the exposure took. Opening the case this afternoon, she discovered a silvery image inside a gilt frame, and for the first time beheld her own likeness. I saw my face as I had never seen it before, she wrote in her diary, and strange thoughts flowed through my mind.
The proprietors of the gallery had promised her a “lifelike and enduring” portrait, but in fact she looked like a ghost. If she tilted the image in one direction or another, she found, her face vanished, and the effect was unsettling. In my estimation it is better to make the hearts of your friends the plates upon which to impress our pictures, than steel, brass or any inanimates, she wrote, and then closed the little case, vowing not to dwell further on the matter. But she couldn’t help herself. Dipping her pen back into the ink, she scribbled, My first picture! When will my last one be taken? Let the future answer.
Now, inside Mr. Hager’s hall, the band has resumed playing, and the bright present again quells the afternoon’s odd sensations. The woman in the taffeta gown turns with pleasure to the spectacle around her. The room is vast and smells of fresh paint; there is a tiny balcony at one end, and there are tall windows along each wall. Mr. Hager has pledged that this will be the site of so much she has dreamed of: dancing lessons, balls, lectures, fairs, concerts, prayer meetings, and of course plays, tales brought to life by performers who will travel hundreds of miles for her sake, so that she can come to this room, and sit in the shadows, and lose herself in their sorcery.
Thunder begins to rumble, and someone gasps, but Mr. Hager laughs and announces in a triumphant voice, “My friends, there is nothing to fear, nothing at all, for Mr. Sloan”—he points to the dapper man at his left—“Mr. Sloan has thought of everything, and we are quite safe tonight. Quite safe indeed.”
It is true. Should lightning strike, a man beside her whispers, it would hit not this building but the ingenious wrought-iron contraption first designed by Mr. Franklin, which sits on the roof and runs down the side of the hall, deep into the ground, carrying electricity with it. You are entirely safe, he assures her, and smiles.
She looks up at the ceiling and imagines the tall rod above it that guards her life and the lives of everyone around her. The rain continues to fall, but here in Fulton Hall everything is dry and warm, and although she knows better, she allows herself to believe that nothing can break the spell of this prodigious building, this temple of art, here in the center of the tranquil inland city she calls home.
“WHAT HAS THE NORTH TO DO WITH SLAVERY?”: 1852–1861
We ask two things of the structures we erect: that they shelter us and that they communicate “whatever we find important and need to be reminded of,” writes John Ruskin. Christopher Hager’s town hall did both. Its soaring lines and airy façade spoke of the civilized society to which Lancastrians aspired. Enter, the building’s exterior seemed to suggest, and behold your better self. Its interior spoke of darker matters.
Two days after the grand opening of Fulton Hall, the first ad for a show in the new space appeared in the Lancaster press: Kendall and Dickinson’s Ethiopian Minstrels, a band of white “serenaders” particularly admired for their “delineation of negro character.” Banjo, tambourine, fiddle, bones—the simulated sounds of plantation life in the American South—soon filled Lancaster’s new town hall. Songs about darkies in the kitchen and slaves on the block, the poor nigger’s fate is hard, the white man’s heart is stone: even a building as fine as Hager’s could not muffle the beast that stalked American life in 1852.
The passage by Congress, two years earlier, of the Fugitive Slave Law—under which every U.S. citizen, regardless of personal belief or religion, could be forced to participate in the capture of blacks fleeing slavery—had plunged Northerners into a moral swamp. “If our resistance to this law is not right, there is no right,” cried Ralph Waldo Emerson. His neighbor Bronson Alcott asked, “What has the North to do with slavery?” The answer was clear: everything.
Hager’s hall was itself complicit. Despite passage of a gradual abolition act in 1780, the state of Pennsylvania had continued to cooperate with Southerners seeking the return of their “property” until well into the nineteenth century, and freedom-seeking slaves who crossed the Maryland border into Lancaster County were routinely incarcerated in the jail whose walls would become the foundation of Fulton Hall. “Negro” Isaac; “Negress” Phillis; Jacob Bott, “a runaway from Baltimore”; Venus Levan, daughter of Lidy Profit, “woman of Color,” and servant of Thomas Neal; William Toogood (alias Abram Boston), “colored man”; James Craten, “negro,” and who knows how many other enslaved people from the American South spent days, weeks, sometimes months locked inside Lancaster’s prison while bounty hunters and slaveholders compiled and submitted the legal documents necessary to remove them from the state and return them to bondage—or abolitionists tried through judicial means to free them.
Meanwhile, men like Christopher Hager, who ran cotton mills and whose banks invested in them, supported the industry that kept African Americans in chains. When Hager and other city leaders opened Lancaster’s first cotton factory in 1847, even Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—who voted against the Fugitive Slave Law and defended Pennsylvanians who violated it—endorsed the enterprise, for the mills meant jobs and prosperity in a town struggling to move from an artisan to a factory economy.
So Fulton Hall was built, at least in part, with cotton money, and in his opening-night address, Judge Alexander Hayes paid tribute to the mills that had brought “new life and activity into our own too quiet city” and helped spur a building boom. Witness the new gasworks, new jail, new churches, two new cotton mills, and a thousand new homes that had gone up in just the previous year, Hayes said. Construction was also under way on a new courthouse, designed by Samuel Sloan, who in the summer of 1852 helped lay the building’s cornerstone. Into it went a Bible, an almanac, and a copy of President Millard Fillmore’s message to Congress endorsing the Compromise of 1850—which included the Fugitive Slave Law.
While the new courthouse was going up, trials and hearings took place in Fulton Hall. For a time, as well, the congregation of a local church used the space for Sunday worship—the first of many times the hall would host Christian gatherings. Newly established Franklin and Marshall College held its first commencement ceremonies inside the Fulton in June 1853, with trustee James Buchanan presiding over the event.