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Go to the Beginning Chapter 3: (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Mr. March, now back in the Clement house in the present, helps the impatient surgeon tend to the wounded. He runs into Grace who is still living there, tending to the ailing Mr. Clement. Grace remembers Mr. March warmly, and helps him with the wounded. She catches him up on everything that's happened: while March made a fortune as a peddler and then became a Unitarian minister and abolitionist, the Clement family suffered a sharp decline. Mrs. Clement died. The son got killed in a hunting accident. Mr. Clement sold Annie's kids further south, and Annie drowned herself in the river. Mr. Clement's health disintegrated. Harris left, and worse managers ran the plantation into the ground. Grace herself barely escaped being sold as a prostitute: only the disfiguring scars on her back from the long-ago flogging saved her. Mr. March asks why Grace remains with Mr. Clement when the military surgeon has offered to get Grace a job in a hospital in Georgetown. Grace confesses that Mr. Clement is her own father, and she feels some loyalty to him. March realizes that he and Grace are still attracted to each other. Chapter 4: Mr. March writes another flowery letter to Marmee after his unit captures Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. He remembers how he met Marmee through her brother Daniel Day, a fellow abolitionist and Unitarian minister. Mr. March goes into town and stops a group of soldiers harassing a "rebel" woman and her daughter. He reports their conduct to the colonel only to find that the colonel wants him transferred. March is too radical a Christian to be a comforting chaplain. Plus his abolitionist stance is very unpopular: the Union soldiers regard freed slaves as future competition for their jobs up North. The colonel orders March to apply for a position with the "contraband": freed slaves who work captured plantations to support the Union army's side. March refuses, and the colonel threatens him: apparently the surgeon has written out a complaint that he once saw March and Grace embracing. If March doesn't transfer, the colonel will put the surgeon's complaint in March's military file. To avoid a scandal, March bitterly agrees to transfer. Chapter 5: Mr. March remembers being a young minister and moving to Concord, Massachusetts. He rooms with the Thoreau family and makes friends with their eccentric grown son, Henry David. He meets Ralph Waldo Emerson at a party attended by many, including Marmee and her brother, who routinely smuggle slaves to freedom along the underground railroad. He and Marmee sneak away from the party and consummate their relationship in the forest. That night they conceive their oldest daughter Meg. The next day March marries Marmee in a quiet ceremony in her parents' parlor. Chapter 6: Mr. March arrives at Oak Landing plantation now being leased to Ethan Canning, a young Illinois lawyer. He is shocked at what he sees: the house is stripped of furniture, and the black "contraband" (who haven't been paid in months) are starving and sickly, and must toil sun-up to sundown in the cotton fields. Some grudgingly admit that life was better under their former masters the Crofts. Worst of all, one named Zeke has been confined to a dry well for stealing a hog to feed his children. Horrified, March confronts Canning who gives a different viewpoint. Zeke stole the hog for his grown sons who ride with the rebel forces, enjoying the plunder. Apparently Canning inherited a no-win situation when he arrived so late in the cotton-picking season. Now everyone including him must work non-stop or die of starvation. On top of that, Canning gets no protection from the inadequate Union garrison against rebel raids. Mr. March listens, both humbled and horrified. |
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