past. The Freedom Party had laid on an enormous rally to mark the changing of the year, and had succeeded, he feared, beyond its wildest dreams.
A strident sea of humanity filled Hampton Park to hear Jake Featherston, who'd come down from Richmond to speak. Dozens of searchlights stabbed up into the sky, creating columns of silvery radiance that seemed to transform the park into an enormous public building. Blocks of Freedom Party bully boys in their white shirts and butternut trousers, along with veterans from the Tin Hats-who wore uniforms even more closely resembling those of the Confederate Army-stood out amid the swarms of ordinary Charlestonians who'd come to the outskirts of the city.
More bully boys in white and butternut, these carrying long truncheons, formed a perimeter around the crowd. The searchlights spread just enough light around to let Potter see how very ready for a brawl they looked.
He touched Braxton Donovan's arm. 'We can't try to break this up, not with the men we've got here,' he said urgently. 'They'll slaughter us.'
Donovan grimaced, but then reluctantly nodded. 'Just our luck,' he said. 'We try to take a leaf out of the Freedom Party's book, and it doesn't work.' They'd brought along seventy-five, maybe even a hundred, stalwart young Whigs armed with a motley assortment of street-fighting weapons. The force would have been plenty to disrupt any ordinary Freedom Party gathering. Attacking this one… Potter shook his head. He would sooner have sent infantrymen charging uphill against machine-gun nests and massed artillery.
Disgust in his voice, he said, 'Featherston even has the luck of the weather.' A December night in Charleston could easily have been rainy, could have been freezing, could even have seen snow-though that was unlikely. But the thermometer stood in the upper forties, with a million stars in the sky trying to fight their way through the searchlight beams. The moon and, even lower in the east, Jupiter blazed bright.
'So what do we do now?' Donovan asked. 'Just send the boys home? Go on home ourselves? That stinks, you want to know what I think.'
'Getting massacred stinks worse,' Potter answered. 'You can go or stay, whichever you want. They can go or stay, whichever they want. Me, I'll hang around and hear what that Featherston bastard has to say.'
'You thinking of going over to the Freedom Party?' Donovan asked. 'You blocked me when I tried to read Anne Colleton out of the Whigs, and now she's back in bed with dear old Jake. Fat lot of good you did us.'
'I was wrong,' Potter said with a scowl. 'You're lucky-you've never been wrong in all your born days, have you?' He still missed Anne. His mind kept exploring how things between them had soured, as a man's tongue will explore the empty socket that recently held a tooth.
Admitting he was wrong disconcerted Donovan. The lawyer probably didn't hear it happen often enough to know what to do when it did. 'All right, all right,' he said gruffly. 'Let's forget about it, then.'
'I wish I could,' Potter said. The other Whig didn't know what to make of that, either. Too bad, Potter thought.
A white-shirted Freedom Party man came up to them. 'You fellas want to move along now,' he said, almost indulgently-he knew he had strength on his side.
Potter looked at him. 'What we want to do is kick your damn teeth down your throat,' he growled.
'Watch your mouth,' the Freedom Party man said, indulgent no more. 'We can squash y'all flat like a cockroach-and just what you deserve. If I give a yell-'
'If you give a yell, you're a dead man,' Clarence Potter promised. 'Your side might win the fight afterwards, but you won't be around to enjoy it. I promise.'
The man in white shirt and butternut trousers scowled at him. He stared back, no expression at all on his face. The Freedom Party hooligan was the first to look away. A moment later, he spun and stalked off. 'You told him,' Braxton Donovan said, as if Potter and the Whigs had won some sort of victory.
'He's going to come back with enough men to squash us flat,' Potter said. 'Go on home, and take the boys with you. We'll get other chances. I'm going to hang around.'
'You're crazy,' Braxton Donovan declared.
'No, it's just that I was in intelligence during the war. I want to know what the enemy is up to,' Potter replied with a shrug. 'Or maybe I am crazy. You never can tell.'
As the Whigs' outnumbered toughs headed away from Hampton Park and back toward downtown Charleston, Potter mingled with the Freedom Party men and women still streaming in to hear Featherston speak. That mingling came just in time, too. The fellow he'd faced down returned with a lot of men at his back. He looked around and laughed when he didn't see Potter or any of the other Whigs.
They were leaving anyway, you son of a bitch, Potter thought, and now I've found my way inside.
By their clothes, most of the men who wanted to hear Jake Featherston were farmers and laborers-most, but far from all. Potter saw druggists and shopkeepers and businessmen and even a few who looked like professional men. Not all the men were Great War veterans, either. More than Potter had expected looked too young to have fought in the war. That surprised and dismayed him. The women coming in-perhaps a third of the audience-likewise came from all social groups, with the emphasis on the lower middle class.
Potter pushed forward as far as he could. Even so, the rostrum from which Featherston would speak remained halfway across the park from him, and seemed tiny as a toy. Everyone exclaimed as searchlights, swinging toward the podium, picked out a face behind it. But that wasn't Jake Featherston's lean visage, which Potter knew all too well. Whoever that was, pinned in the glow of the bright lights, he'd never missed a meal and was nobody Potter recognized. Some of the people around Potter grumbled, too.
Then the plump stranger introduced himself as one of the new Freedom Party Congressmen South Carolina had sent up to Richmond in the election of 1929. That was plenty to win him a round of applause from the Party faithful. Clarence Potter had to join it to keep something dreadful from happening to him. He felt like washing his hands the first chance he got.
'And now,' the Congressman boomed, 'it gives me tremendous pleasure to have the privilege of presenting to you all the leader of our great Freedom Party, Mr. Jaaake Featherston!'
The roar of applause and cheers that went up stunned Potter's ears. He opened his mouth, but silently. He didn't have to shout, and keeping his mouth open helped protect his ears. Featherston, an old artilleryman, likely knew that trick himself.
Through the shouts and clapping from the crowd came disciplined yells from the men in white shirts and butternut trousers: 'Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!' Little by little, more and more people joined that chant, so it began to drown out the noise all around: 'Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!' The two-syllable word felt as heavy and regular as a heartbeat.
Jake Featherston let the chant build to a deafening crescendo, then raised both hands above his head. Still disciplined, the blocks of goons fell silent at once. Without their steadying influence, the cries faded away after perhaps fifteen seconds.
Into the ringing quiet that followed, Featherston said, 'It's always good to come to Charleston, on account of this here is where the Confederate States of America were born.' He couldn't miss getting applause with that line. He couldn't-and he didn't. Again, Clarence Potter had to clap along with everybody else to keep from standing out. He hated that, but saw no way around it.
Featherston went on, 'They say showing's better than telling, and I guess they're right. We've been telling people what's wrong with the Confederate States for more than ten years now, and not enough folks wanted to listen. Now the Whigs have gone and shown we were right all along, and all of a sudden everybody's paying attention to us. I wish to heaven it didn't have to happen like this, I truly do, but here we are just the same.'
To Clarence Potter, staunch Whig, it wasn't much of a joke, but people around him laughed. Featherston said, 'I'm warning people right now, it's not a good idea to think about the Freedom Party like we're just another bunch of politicians.'
Cries of, 'No!' and, 'Hell, no!' and, 'Better not!' rang from the crowd. Featherston let them spread through Hampton Park, then raised his hands again. This time, silence fell at once.
Into it, he said, 'We are the Confederacy's destiny. We are the Confederacy's future. We're giving our dear country a faith and a will again. We have to concentrate all our strength on action, revolutionary action. Because we're going that way, we're gathering into our ranks every last member of the Confederate people who still has energy and nerve-that's you, folks, and I'm glad of it!'
People were even more eager to applaud themselves than they were to applaud Jake Featherston. Again,
