North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  The man spoke with the heavy accent Cooper equated with the impoverished farmers of the Georgia coast. Did the mate mean what he said, or was this merely the start of fare negotiations?

  “I am under orders to report to Secretary Mallory in Richmond as soon as practicable. I’ve been waiting nearly a week to find a ship. I’ll pay whatever price you ask.”

  The mate scratched his armpit. “Space is precious on the old Witch. We have one cabin, but she’s usually stowed full of cut nails, things like that.”

  “Nails?” Cooper repeated, astonished.

  “Sure. They sold at four dollars a keg right after the war started. Then one of the owners of this ship and a few other gentlemen cornered the import market; and now they fetch ten.” He grinned, but Cooper’s eyes had narrowed with dislike.

  “Tell me, Mr.—”

  “Soapes. Like the stuff you wash with, but add an e.”

  “Where’s your home, Mr. Soapes?”

  “Port of Fernandina. That’s in Florida.”

  “I know where it is. You’re a Southerner, then?”

  “Yes, sir, same as you and Captain Ballantyne. You said your name’s Main?” Cooper nodded. “Any relation to the Mains of South Carolina?”

  “I am a member of that family. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, no special reason. Just heard of it, that’s all.”

  Mr. Soapes was lying; Cooper felt certain of it but couldn’t guess the reason. Nervous now, the mate shouted at a stevedore teetering down the gangway with a bale balanced on his bare back. “Any of you niggers drop cotton in the water, you’ll starve till you pay for it. Sixty cents a pound. Market price.”

  Cooper cleared his throat. “Tell me, Mr. Soapes, what cargo will you be taking to Wilmington?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual.”

  “But I don’t know. What is the usual?”

  Soapes scratched his stomach and looked everywhere but at Cooper. “Sherry wine. Havana cigars. Believe we have a consignment of cheeses this time. Then there’s tea and tinned meats and plenty of coffee—” As he recited the list, his voice grew fainter and Cooper’s cheeks redder. “We’ve some bay rum—oh, yes, and some London-made bonnet frames.”

  “When the Confederacy is desperate for war materiel, you’re bringing in luxuries?”

  “We carry what’s profitable, sir.” After that retort, the mate’s courage wilted. “Anyway, I’m not the supercargo. The captain handles that job. Speak to him.”

  “I shall, believe me.”

  “He won’t be back from the whorehouse till morning.”

  Cooper felt like punching Soapes. He had said whorehouse only because he was embarrassed and wanted to strike back by embarrassing Judah.

  The boy caught on and grinned. “My pa takes me to those places all the time. Maybe we’ll meet him.”

  Cooper boxed his son’s ear. The mate looked stupefied until he realized he was being made fun of. Then he grew as red as Cooper, who marched his son toward the gangway, unamused.

  Later that day, Cooper called on J. B. Lafitte, local agent of Fraser, Trenholm. He introduced himself and inquired about Captain William Ballantyne of Fernandina. He learned a good deal.

  Ballantyne, a native of Florida, had a reputation as a competent master, though he wasn’t a popular one; he drove his crewmen hard. In the past year, Lafitte said, Ballantyne had also become a rich master. In addition to his captain’s pay—the customary five thousand, which he demanded in U.S. dollars and banked in Bermuda—Ballantyne conducted some personal speculation on every voyage.

  Ballantyne’s vessel made only eleven knots at her best—dangerously slow in view of where she sailed. But she hadn’t been built for the trade, only refitted, at Bowdler, Chaffer and Company, a Merseyside yard Cooper knew well. Lafitte said Water Witch was owned by a consortium of Southerners, a fact no one took trouble to conceal, but the names of the individual owners had never been publicized so far as he knew.

  Thus Cooper developed a strong dislike of the ship’s captain and owners before he returned next morning. Directed belowdecks, he was overwhelmed by the smell of cured meat. Ballantyne’s cabin in the stern reeked of tobacco; small crates filled every spare corner. The crates bore Spanish labels, with the word Habana prominent.

  “Cigars,” Ballantyne said in an offhand way, noticing his visitor’s curiosity. “My private venture this trip. Be seated on that stool, and I’ll be with you momentarily. I’m just finishing our manifest. It shows us bound for the Bermudas. We never sail anywhere but the port of St. George, or this one.”

  He beamed like a cherub. William Ballantyne was a moonfaced man with little hair left, except in his ears. He had spectacles and a small paunch and a grating accent that sounded more like the Appalachians than the deep South.

  But the need to reach Richmond took precedence over Cooper’s conscience; at least it did until he worked out details of the passage. Ballantyne had a fawning manner and an unctuous smile. Cooper silently characterized both as false.

  “Well, then, that’s done,” Ballantyne said at the conclusion of the negotiations. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you called yesterday. Mr. Soapes told me you have some, uh, quibbles about our cargo.”

  “Since you raise the subject, I do.”

  Ballantyne kept grinning but now with a dash of nastiness. “I raised it, sir, because I guessed you would.”

  “I wouldn’t call them quibbles, Captain. They are serious moral objections. Why does this vessel carry nothing but luxury goods?”

  “Why, sir, because the owners desire it. Because that’s what turns the coin, don’t you know?” He brushed his fingertips with his thumb, feeling invisible metal.

  “Do you mean to tell me you can make a profit carrying cured meat?”

  “Yes indeed, sir. Coming out, we dropped some of our cotton at St. George and in that space put a supply of Bermuda bacon. I think it’s to be transshipped to the gulf for the armies in the West, but I wouldn’t swear. All I know is, yesterday I sold it to an officer of the Confederate Quartermaster Corps”—beaming now—“for three times what it cost me in Bermuda. It’s the finest meat available from New York State. The farmers up there would rather sell to our side than their own. Make a lot more that way.” He rubbed thumb against fingers again.

  Livid, Cooper said, “You’re a damned scoundrel, Ballantyne. Men and boys are dying for want of guns and ammunition, and you carry bacon, cigars, bonnet frames.”

  “Listen here. I told you I carry what I’m instructed to carry. Plus a little something extra to secure my old age.” The smile cracked, showing the creature behind it. “I’m not educated or well off like you, sir. I grew up in the North Carolina mountains. My people were ignorant. I have no schooling except aboard ship—no trade but this—and I must make of it what I can. Besides”—the ingratiating grin slipped back in place—“I don’t know why you rail so. This kind of trade’s common. Everybody’s doing it.”

  “No, Captain, your own lack of scruples and patriotism are not universal. Not by any means.”

  Ballantyne’s smile vanished. “I don’t have to give you passage, you know.”

  “I think you do. Unless you wish governmental attention directed to the affairs of this vessel. It can be arranged.”

  Ballantyne rattled the papers in his hand. For the first time, his voice showed unsteadiness. “You try to sink me and you’ll be sinking someone near and dear.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Mr. Soapes said you hailed from South Carolina. So does one of our owners, whose middle name is the same as your last one. She has a twenty percent equity in Water Witch and a brother in the Navy Department.”

  The harbor water lapped the hull. Cooper could scarcely swallow, let alone speak. Finally: “What are you saying?”

  “Come on, sir—don’t pretend you don’t know. One of the owners is a lady named Huntoon—Mrs. Ashton Main Huntoon of Richmond and the Palmetto State. Ain’t—isn’t she a relative?�
��

  Seeing Cooper’s sickened expression, he grinned. “Thought so. Added up the two and two after I spoke with Mr. Soapes. You’ve booked passage on a family vessel, Mr. Main.”

  67

  GEORGE LEANED ON THE rail of the gallery and gazed down at the gilt-and-marble Senate chamber. It was the fifteenth day of January. He had slept badly, waking often, stretched between hope and dread.

  Wade, the architect of the attack, rose first.

  “I have so often expressed my opposition to bills of this character and to the policy of appropriating money for the establishment and support of this institution that I do not propose to take up time now to argue against it.”

  In the next sentence, in the universal fashion of politicians, he did exactly what he had just said he wouldn’t.

  “I know the institution has been of no use to the country. If there had been no West Point Military Academy, there would have been no rebellion. It was the hotbed from which rebellion was hatched. From thence emanated your principal traitors and conspirators.”

  The debate was joined. It grew sharp, then intemperate, as the minutes lengthened into an hour and the statements to paragraphs, then to orations.

  Senator Wilson, the military affairs chairman George had cultivated, took the floor to acknowledge the existence of weaknesses in the Academy but then cited evidence contradicting Wade—the very same figures George had included in his letter to the Times. Wilson thought West Point no “nursery of treason,” though he did fault it for “an exclusiveness—a sort of assumption of superiority among its graduates in the army that is sometimes very offensive.”

  Senator Nesmith tried to blunt the attack by naming graduates who had given their lives for the Union—Mansfield and Reno were two of the best known—and concluded by trying to rouse the emotion of his colleagues by reciting twelve lines of a poem on heroism.

  Immediately, Wade charged from the flank. The institution was worthless because it trained engineers, not leaders of a fighting army. Skillfully, he wove a repetitive phrase into his diatribe: “Traitors to the country—traitors to the country—traitors to the country.”

  George’s head started to ache. To twist and color the truth as Wade did was abominable. Lee was an engineer but brilliant as a tactician. Why such distortions? Was it the nature of the political beast or just something peculiar to this war, this hour, this special nexus of interests and passions? Did radicals like Wade truly feel the hatreds they expressed? The possibility, by no means new, still had power to terrify him.

  There might be a more cynical explanation, of course. If Wade and his crowd railed against the South until it was destroyed, they could step in as a political party and rule it.

  On and on Wade went, merciless. “I am for abolishing this institution.” Scattered applause. “We do not want any government interposition for military education any more than for any other education.”

  John Sherman left his desk, began to scurry among his colleagues, sensing a tide flowing the wrong way. Foster of Connecticut spoke in rebuttal. Had not Yale and Harvard educated as many Southerners as West Point?

  Wade sneered. “Yale College is not upheld by the government of the United States.”

  Then there was renewed argument over whether the Academy had or had not produced quality leaders for the Union. This line of debate was interrupted by the cadaverous, mean-visaged Lane of Kansas, whose curt remarks—scarcely a sentence or two—ended with a triumphant repetition of the Academy epitaph he had been jobbing around the city for days: “Died of West Point pro-slaveryism!”

  Wade stamped his feet and expressed his approval vocally. Sherman scurried faster.

  On it went. Arguments that West Point was a “monopoly.” More arguments that it trained men improperly. Here, the powerful Lyman Trumbull spoke for the first time.

  “Because they understood the erection of fortifications, they were therefore supposed to be Napoleons? There is the mistake! What we want is generals to command our armies who will rely upon the strength of our armies! Let loose the citizen soldiery of this country upon the rebels! Dismiss from the army every man who knows how to build a fortification and let the men of the North, with their strong arms and indomitable spirit, move down upon the rebels, and I tell you they will grind them to powder!”

  The applause, from a good number of gallery spectators as well as from the floor, resounded loudly this time. George’s palms were cold and damp, his heart beating too fast. The arguments grew in ferocity.

  Lane flashed a whole new set of verbal knives. “This institution for more than thirty years has been under the absolute dominion of your Southern aristocrats. A young man who enrolls at West Point is taught there to admire above all things that two-penny, miserable slave aristocracy of the South—he is taught Southern secession doctrine as a science!”

  To George’s left, someone clapped. He knew who it was and didn’t trust himself to look. Senator Sherman and several of his allies raised their heads; the applause stopped.

  Debate continued. Wade put forth his proposal—that West Point be abandoned so a system of separate institutions within the individual states would have room to grow in its place. By this point George felt faint—a lingering effect of the influenza, maybe—and his hands were clenched. The question was called.

  “All in favor?”

  The yeas were loud, fervent.

  “All opposed?”

  The nays were even louder but—was it hope playing tricks with his hearing?—fewer.

  “I make the count,” Vice President Hamlin said, “yeas twenty-nine, nays ten.”

  Groans in the gallery and from the aisles and desks below. But there was a mingling of hearty applause. John Sherman gave George an exhausted glance, with no sign of pleasure save a spasmodic jerk of his lips. Only then did George dare turn and gaze along the row to pale, fuming Stanley.

  George got up, intending to speak some conciliatory word to his brother. Stanley rose, turned his back, and left the gallery while George was still six feet away.

  From the Capitol, George rode the street railway to Willard’s, where he went to the saloon bar to celebrate. Mentally cursing the trivial work waiting at the Winder Building, he kept buying rounds for other officers at the bar. Presently, all companions gone, he wandered to a table, sat, and began to recite some advertising doggerel which had caught his fancy in a newspaper.

  “Should the weather be cold and the jacket be thin, Just take a wee toothful of Morris’s Gin.”

  “I think you should go home, Major Hazard,” said the waiter in charge of the table.

  “Should ever the earth be flooded again, Let us all hope the rain will be Morris’s Gin.”

  “I very definitely think you should go home,” the waiter said, removing George’s not yet empty glass. He went home.

  When he had paid the driver and reeled into the house, he said to Constance: “We won.”

  “But you look so grim. Not to say unsteady. Do sit down before you fall down.” She slid the parlor doors shut so the children wouldn’t catch sight of him.

  “Today I saw the real face of this town, Constance.” Holding his head, he watched a marble-topped table separate into two. “I really saw it. Ignorance, prejudice, disregard for the truth—that’s the real Washington. Some of those damned rascals in the Senate spouted lies as if they were quoting the Ten Commandments. I can’t stand this place any longer. I must get out somehow, some—”

  His head lolled back against the chair doily, then fell toward his shoulder. Constance stepped behind him, loving him for an honorable but imperfect man. She reached down to stroke his forehead. His mouth sagged open and he snored.

  In contrast, Stanley seemed to thrive in the Byzantine atmosphere of the city. He no longer felt himself a newcomer—quite the opposite—and he relished his growing responsibilities as a trusted aide of Mr. Stanton. Further, he was making vast sums of money on his own for the first time.

  Of course, passage of the West
Point appropriation bill was a setback, and it left him peevish for several days. The peevishness was enhanced by that of the secretary, which had prevailed ever since General Burnside had begun a movement against Lee on January 20, only to be balked two days later by pouring rains that changed the Virginia roads to bogs.

  Burnside’s apologists blamed an act of God for the failure of what was sneeringly termed “the Mud March.” Those in charge blamed the general and replaced him with Joe Hooker. Fighting Joe announced his determination to reorganize the army, improve every aspect from sanitation to morale—he immediately started granting furloughs—and, above all, annihilate the rebels in the spring.

  A further heightening of Stanley’s peevishness occurred when Isabel discovered Laban with his drawers down and his sex organ up inside a too-willing maid they employed. Stanley was forced to apply a birch rod to his son’s backside—increasingly difficult as the twins grew bigger—then dismiss the sluttish maid, which didn’t pain him, and pay her an extra, hundred dollars, which did.

  On a gloomy day at the end of the month, Stanton called him in. Though he had stayed at his desk all night—he did so frequently—the secretary looked fresh and vigorous. A gray pinstripe drape covered him from the neck down; the War Department messenger who doubled as barber was brushing lather over the secretary’s upper lip in preparation for razoring it clean, a twice-weekly ritual.

  “Look at this, and I’ll be with you momentarily,” Stanton said, tossing something metallic onto the desk. The razor rasped.

  Stanley picked up the object, which proved to be a dull brown head of Lincoln crudely cut or filed from the center of one of the big copper pennies last minted in ’57. The messenger finished the job, toweled Stanton’s lip, and whipped the sheet off. Stanley turned the penny over and discovered a small safety pin soldered to it.

  “The foes of this government are wearing those,” the secretary said once the barber was gone. “Openly!” He shouted the word, but Stanley had grown accustomed to Stanton’s outbursts. The man was passionate about his beliefs, if about nothing else.