Virginia plantation owner Richman Davidson has been revolving a scandalous idea in his brain. What would be the upshot, both in Virginia and throughout the southern states, were he to free his slaves?
He was a well known figure. He knew he was being eyed for national office. Such an action would rock Virginia politics and have repercussions perhaps throughout the nation. But as a Christian, he could continue as a slaveowner no longer.
He had already waited longer than he should have. The implications of what he knew God was leading him to do would be far-reaching indeed.
From the opening of Dream of Freedom, Book 1 of “American Dreams”:
The morning of early April promised warmth. A woman in a plain blue work dress, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun, stood on the porch of an expansive two-story brick plantation house. Her gaze was directed at the figure of her husband across the fields beyond the barn where he was just disappearing into the arbor. Carolyn Davidson knew why. This was likely to be an important day in his future.
Before he set out, he needed to know that he and his God were of one mind. As she watched him, she glanced about. Nearly everything upon which her eyes fell belonged to them, at least it did until final disposition of the estate was settled… green meadows filled with grazing Red Devon cattle, and beyond them ploughed fields sprouting new wheat, tobacco, cotton, and oats. The pride she felt in what surrounded her was not in possession, even if theirs was more tenuous than it ought to have been, but in stewardship. They worked hard, the land produced, and God prospered the result.
If a creed could be said to dictate her outlook on the life of farmer and plantation owner, as well as that of wife, stewardship would certainly be contained within it. Hers had not always been an easy life, but in most respects she was now a woman at peace—at peace with herself, at peace with her God, and at peace with her role in the divine order of things. Glancing to her right, she squinted imperceptibly. On the clearest of days, the Blue Ridge Mountains might faintly be seen to the west. But not today. On this morning, as on most, the characteristic thin blue haze obscured the horizon from sight. She brought her gaze back in front of her as she saw her husband emerge from the arbor. Richmond Davidson had also been thinking about their land on this unseasonably warm morning.
His visage, however, revealed a distant look, extending far beyond the boundaries of this land that had been his father’s and grandfather’s before him. If his life’s focus took on more complexities than his wife’s, it was not because the intellectual currents of his brain ran more deeply than hers. She was fully his mental equal, an essential sparring partner as they wrestled through issues that confronted them. But his mental shoulders bore the added responsibilities of manhood at a critical time, not only in their lives together, but also in the life of their nation.
The time was quickly approaching when he would have to bring politics into his faith, whereas his wife cared little for such thorny issues. “Let men dictate the affairs of state,” she said. She cared only about their people whose welfare God had given them to watch over. Their home stood about two-thirds of the way to the Maryland border from North Carolina.
Fate had placed them where they could not ignore the increasing drumbeats of history. When destiny arrived, they would be drawn into the middle of it, the wife as well as the husband. Difficult decisions were on the horizon. Would those decisions, Davidson wondered, pit him with or against his Virginian peers? If the latter, he was well aware that the cost to his reputation would be high, though that had never been one of his prominent priorities.
The internal compass of his conscience was not oriented in a direction that made heroes in the eyes of men, but toward that which made sons and warriors in the invisible conflict of the ages. Right and wrong made up the components of his matrix of life, not what might add to his advantage according to the world’s ledger of success. Like his wife, this inner equilibrium of spiritual perspective had not been easily won, nor were the struggles to maintain it altogether past.
His was a faith he had to work to hold. And the two worked hard together to walk out the life they shared with a tenacity that kept them from dwelling on the griefs and questions of the past. But though he keenly felt the burdens and responsibilities of his position, and though his own personal demons of doubt occasionally seared the memory of his conscience, Richmond Davidson too was a man at peace with himself, his God, and his place in the world.
The year was 1855.