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June 13, 1848
New York City
BEN OPENED THE windows facing Sullivan Street to let in the breeze. He returned to his writing table. For the moment, however, he was reading instead of writing. “In our one meeting in ’37,” his father’s letter explained, “the young Mr. Prime seemed very tolerable for an American, although he is a man of your brother-in-law’s type—like Roger, a little rabbity, frightened of The Game.”
Rabbity Roger Warfield, Ben thought, is only frightened of you, Father. “Frightened of The Game” was Archie Knowles’s peculiar, dismissive judgment of any man who had no obvious flaws, such as dishonesty or laziness or being Catholic, but who lacked verve. The purpose of the letter, his first to Ben in America, was to announce that he had written an introduction on Ben’s behalf to Samuel Prime, a partner in the Wall Street firm with which Sir Archibald had conducted business for years. “Your mother would have wished me to provide this help to you, and therefore, whether you believe it to be meddlesome or not, I have done so.”
The crusty, hearty, insinuating manner was somewhat easier for Ben to appreciate on paper and at a remove of three thousand miles, but as he read he could hear the old man’s voice like he was spouting off right there in the apartment. The last thing Ben wished to do was to meet this Mr. Prime. He had come to America fleeing wellborn bankers.
Ben looked up from the letter to glance around his sitting room. The wall he faced was now a virtual reproduction of a wall of his library in Bruton Street, covered with the dozen framed aquatints and lithographs that Dennis, his former steward, had taken it upon himself to ship to America, as a final fond obeisance. There was the Pawnee warrior who had black silhouettes of bull’s heads painted on his chest…the side-wheeler Fanny steaming down the Ohio River…the Indian boy with the silver ring in his nose and red and green stripes running down one side of his face…a pair of snorting, head-butting bison at sunset, a herd of peaceable bison at sunrise…and the Dakota chief who could have passed for Lydia Winslow’s mother.
“Like sending coals to Newcastle, I am afraid,” Dennis had written in his note, yet Ben was nowhere near such scenes as these. Except for the exhibits at Barnum’s Museum, he had witnessed no war dances or tomahawks or eagle feathers, and remained a thousand miles from bison, log cabins, Conestoga wagons, and armed roughs in leather, half a continent away from frothing wilderness cataracts and infinite treeless prairies.
When he’d arrived, the city had seemed as unlike London as Paris or Bonn, and ten times more exciting. But now, not two months later, as he learned the dialect (I guess that guy out on the sidewalk by the bakery is the storekeeper meant I believe that fellow in the footpath near the bakehouse is the shopkeeper) and became more or less accustomed to the odd local practices (mail deliveries on Sunday and the ceaseless back-patting, tobacco-spitting, approval-seeking, and liquor-drinking), the differences between London and New York had come to seem equivalent to those between London and Glasgow or Dublin. There were more newspapers and Jews than in London, about as many theaters and Irish, fewer coffeehouses and Frenchmen. The workingpeople were, as billed, oblivious to their inferior station, but the New York rich seemed hardly different from the London rich.
When he had decided to leave England, he’d been inspired by a vision to change the course of his life entirely. And yet his life in this strange new city and country was beginning to feel familiar and ordinary. He was settling down, fitting in.
“You seem less and less a fish out of water,” Polly Lucking had told him the night before.
Yes: there was the shocking and bedazzling Polly, who made all the difference. She was wilderness cataract and infinite prairie incarnate. Perhaps Polly herself was his staggering American adventure. He had Polly. Or believed he had her, anyway, every time she smiled or called him “dearest” or squeezed his hand.
“Isabel,” his father’s letter said,
was abed with chills for a week and some. She misses you. The doctor persists in trying to feed me laudanum for the frog wound (which pains me terrible even with winter over). Ah!—I am reminded of two matters additional. While I was traveling a Frenchman arrived at Prince William Street to enquire of you about the murder of a woman in Paris, one of your “revolution” friends. Shufflebotham told him you had left this country and that he had no fixed address for you apart from the Primes in New-York. Secondly, your brother’s relatives have hatched a plan of business for America, which Philip believes you might helpfully assist. He will write you under separate cover with details & etc. Your father, SIR Archibald Knowles.
Marie the stinkpot girl had been killed. It did not surprise Ben. The soldiers must have executed her in the streets that night, hunted her down after she waddled away in her fetters. He shook his head at the suggestion—ridiculous—that Philip and the Mathesons wished to enlist him as some kind of local agent.
He dipped his pen and returned to composing the lecture, his first, for which he had been promised twenty dollars.
Those extraordinary events which I witnessed?…No…which I experienced personally in February in the streets of Paris, ignited my lifelong…fascination? No…my lifelong passion for America… He paused. He dipped…. for America, both as a place and as an idea, apromise, the promise of limitlessness. The promise of limitlessness? Excessive sibilance. He scratched out two words and dipped again…the promise of unbounded liberty in all things, and the robust embrace in polly… He smiled; he scratched; he dipped…the robust embrace in politics as well as ordinary social intercourse of new, untried modes…
June 22, 1848
THE LECTURE HALL was called the Temple of Reason. On the first day of his first American summer, 316 people came to hear “a FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT by a native-English-speaking EYEWITNESS to the late REVOLUTION in the streets of PARIS which inaugurated the present GREAT & STIRRING EVENTS RIPPING ACROSS EUROPE AND THE WORLD!” The audience was a New York microcosm: cabdrivers and brickmakers and lawyers and newspapermen, intelligent Unitarian ladies, a few homesick Frenchmen, one old Negro, jumpy students from New York University and the Free Academy, frowning German leather-crimpers and corset makers who whispered translations to one another as Ben spoke. Sitting together on a bench near the front were a gas fitter (and poster-sticker and former soldier), an actress (and former strumpet), and a photographer (and hack novelist and former newspaper writer).
Ben spent most of his ninety minutes at the podium recounting everything he had seen and felt during his February night and day in Paris (omitting the fact that the “makeshift African weapon” he’d used against the king’s military force had been a stuffed penguin). But he also delivered opinions. He said, apropos the killings and burnings that attended the current revolutions, that “even Nature herself uses lightning and flood and fire to effect rebirth.” Duff nodded at that. When Ben said that the chance of an insurgency overthrowing Queen Victoria was equal to the chance of a coup d’état murdering President Polk and canceling the Bill of Rights, Skaggs chuckled softly and someone in the back of the auditorium cheered loudly and applauded.
As he reached his peroration, Ben said he was certain that the revolutions in Europe were irreversible, secure against the plots of counter-revolutionists. “Time and history move in one direction,” he said. “My friend killed that night in Paris was a painter, and he said to me more than one time, ‘When the paint is squeezed from the tube, you cannot put it back inside again—you must paint with it.’ In Paris and Vienna and Berlin and Milan and Budapest, the paints have been squeezed from the tubes.
“But the effect on me of the remarkable events I witnessed was to arouse my love for wild, hopeful, virgin America…”
Polly, Skaggs, and Duff all smiled.
“My dream of America as an untamed physical wonder…as a great experiment”—Skaggs arched his eyebrows approvingly and exchanged a glance with Duff—“a haven of unbounded liberty, and an eagerness in every man and woman to embrace new and untested modes of li
ving. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I humbly offer myself to you here now as a new volunteer in your continuing American revolution.”
Ben was pleased with his performance. He had endeavored to be thoughtful and sincere but also cheerful, rousing, full of gusto, American. However, the applause was polite and perfunctory. The handbills and posters had not advertised the fact that Benjamin Knowles was English. For quite a few of his listeners—particularly the workingmen, like the two Irish hod carriers who had gone to the lobby to demand their money back as soon as Ben opened his mouth—Ben’s nationality made everything he said dubious. And quite a few had come to the lecture wishing to be told that the United States itself was ripe for armed uprisings.
Several people stood to ask questions. The first, from a boy wearing eyeglasses, was the most cogent: “I am confused, sir, about whether or not you and the late Mr. Ashby actually intended to bear arms on behalf of the republicans in Paris or if you were, rather, content only to…observe the insurrection. And if the latter, why so?”
“The truth, I suppose, is that I am not French, and therefore I had no proper business plunging into their political fights to the death. For his part, Mr. Ashby was under the impression that the uprising would not succeed. And perhaps as well, I am not at heart a revolutionist of the gunning kind.”
The answer caused people to murmur, and several to grumble.
The man who had applauded the prospect of President Polk’s assassination asked Ben about the story appearing in one of the local papers concerning a secret brigade—composed of Parisian revolutionists, Jews from Berlin, and Irish traitors from Mexico—which was now assembling in Florida to lead a revolt among the Negro slaves. Skaggs snorted. Duff clenched his jaw.
“I haven’t a clue about any of that,” Ben replied, “but four months ago, none of us would have believed the upheavals now occurring across Europe. What seemed fantastic yesterday becomes commonplace tomorrow.”
A German man asked how Ben had come to be “familiar with the sentiments of the British proletariat. Are you one of that class?”
“My father was the son of a wheelwright, sir, and while I certainly cannot claim to be a member of the laboring classes, I spent a recent year in a weaving mill.”
“Doing what, then?” shouted one of the Irishmen who had unwillingly stayed for the lecture, “ballaraggin’ the loom-tenders and countin’ your gold?”
A few people laughed, but a handsome woman stood, frowning, and pointed at the Irishman. “Shhhhh!” she said.
“Ah, shush yourself, ya huffy little bluestocking,” the Irishman replied, “it’s a free country.”
“Sir!” said a fellow sitting behind the Irishman, “in our country one is free to debate, not to hurl insults at ladies!”
“Our country, eh?” said a second Irishman. “To hell with ya.”
Skaggs shot to his feet. “Mr. Knowles,” he boomed, trying to reimpose order and defend his friend without appearing to do either, “I understand that you are a close relative of the great lover of democracy and America, Monsieur de Tocqueville…”
Ben nodded.
“…as well as a political associate and very close personal friend of Mr. Frederick Engels, the communist leader.”
Ben nodded, and the audience’s murmuring had changed from querulous to curious and respectful.
“My question, then,” Skaggs said, “is whether it would be possible for you to arrange for Tocqueville and Engels and also, perhaps, men such as the great Italian…Mr. Giuseppe…uhh—”
“Garibaldi,” shouted someone in the audience.
“…yes, and other celebrated friends of democracy and justice from around the world, to convene here in New York for a great symposium, an international parley, if you will, perhaps in the fall.”
The audience was excited by the prospect of such a grand revolutionary symposium.
“Well, sir,” Ben replied with a straight face, “that is a remarkable idea, an incredible plan, and I should welcome it.”
Skaggs applauded, then Polly and Duff, and nearly the whole audience enthusiastically joined in. The lecture promoter strode up onto the stage and stood shaking Ben’s hand longer than anyone had shaken it ever before.
A RECEPTION FOR forty people had been organized in a parlor off the front lobby of the auditorium. All but Polly and a teacher from the Brooklyn Female Academy were men, only two chewed tobacco, none was Irish or German. Skaggs informed Ben that a dozen were “Tribune editors and writers and other Harvard bores from Greeley’s claque.”
Duff and Polly stood among half of the Tribune men, Skaggs and Ben with the other half.
“Do you believe, Mr. Knowles,” someone asked, “that Vienna can reassert imperial control in the East?” Before Ben could answer, Skaggs replied, “As my Hungarian friends say about such matters, ‘Az isten lova bassza meg.’”
The Tribune men, most of them accustomed to Skaggs’s mischief, tried to ignore him. The young city editor asked Ben his business in New York, “apart from enlightening the likes of us.”
“My business here…my business seems to be,” he said, “endeavoring to discover precisely what my business here ought to be.”
“You see, Mr. Knowles,” Skaggs interjected, “is a devotee of the Indian prophet Buddha—and thus his destiny is a never-ending search for his true destiny.”
“And does what you saw in Paris,” someone else asked Ben, “incline you to foresee the same sap rising in America if—”
Skaggs interrupted. “I do believe Mr. Knowles has said all he wishes to say tonight on the subject of France. But I certainly find the hundreds of new newspapers a worthy result,” he said, referring to the post-revolutionary effervescence of journalism in Paris, “and if an insurrection in New York could be assured of the same result, I’d wave a red flag in Washington Square to night. But I cannot imagine any politicians, not American or French or even Prussian, managing to employ a million laborers sensibly.” In Paris, a hundred thousand workers were being paid by the government under the new system of National Workshops. The Tribune men were enthralled by the scheme. They had no idea that the great experiment was already over—that days earlier, the French Assembly had voted to abolish the workshops.
“But, Skaggs,” said Bayard Taylor, a friend of his and one of the younger Tribune men, “surely you are not on the side of the bankers and industrialists in this fight? Why not let the poor men who toil take control of their own arrangements?”
“Because, Bayard, if I, like our comrades in the new French republic, am guaranteed one and a half francs a day to dig trenches and sew flags, or, alternatively, one franc to loaf patriotically, I should certainly choose loafing.”
The others shook their heads.
Across the room, Polly and Duff were listening to the other Tribune men question a Mr. Noyes about Oneida, the community he had founded upstate, and its new offshoot at a house in Brooklyn Heights. The men were arguing the differences among the various utopian schemes, discussing a half dozen of them—Perfectionism versus Fourierism versus a more general Associationism, socialism versus Noyes’s “Bible communism.” Through this fog of jargon, Polly was intrigued by the glimmers of life at Oneida.
When one of the Tribune men, Mr. Brisbane, asked Noyes whether “your fourscore members of Oneida truly practice free love,” both Luckings snapped to attention—Duff because he had never heard the phrase, Polly because she had discussed it recently with her new friend Mary Gove.
“If by your slippery term ‘free love’ you mean the invidious caricatures that appear in certain newspapers, then by all that’s holy, sir, no,” Noyes replied. “But if you mean a righteous opposition to tyranny over the form of any individual’s affections, man or woman, why then, yes indeed.”
He shot Polly a quick, magisterial smile, which she returned. Duff glared at him.
“Though a man loves apples,” Noyes added, “may he not relish a peach too?”
Free love as Polly understood it meant freedo
m from the dreariest oppressions of marriage. And these new colonies, whatever their particular philosophies, sounded splendid to her, like her country girlhood but reorganized as an idyll: bed, books, companionship, civilized conversation, fresh food, clean air, free water, green fields. She listened closely as the Tribune fellow, Brisbane, like a kindly schoolteacher, described for her such places that he had visited.
Noyes and most of the other guests drifted out. Those remaining formed one circle, and the conversation returned to Paris, not the new utopia but the swoony old one—a breakfast of eggs and absinthe overlooking the Seine at the Café Cuisinier, the twenty thousand dollars paid to George Sand for her latest novel, the summer fragrance of the carnation beds and apple orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg…
NONE OF THEM imagined as they chatted that Paris was at that moment a frenzy of gunfire and explosions and death. Thousands of unemployed ditchdiggers and weavers and carpenters, and some of their wives and children (as well as men like Ashby’s friend Théodore), had gathered in two hundred different blocks of the city and once again heaped together wreckage and garbage to block the streets. At the summits of their great piles they affixed flags that bore hand-painted slogans—Du travail ou la mort!… Work or Death!…Du pain ou la mort!… Bread or Death! But this time, unlike in February, the great mass of Frenchmen were more frightened than sympathetic, and this time the regime—the new, liberal rulers of the republic, including the Count de Tocqueville—were resolute. This time, it was not a lark on either side, but war, determined and horrible.
As soon as the barricades had been raised, the Assembly declared a state of siege and the battle began—and still raged now, through the Paris night and into morning. Against the Paris revolutionists, the army and National Guard and Mobile Guard—more than one hundred thousand uniformed men in all—unleashed not only cavalry charges and musket fire but artillery assaults. In the course of five minutes’ bombardment, a flurry of 20-pounders striking near the Pont Saint-Michel turned the Café Cuisinier to a ruin. Thousands more national guards were racing toward Paris at superhuman speed, on the railways. By the next twilight, when forty-nine prisoners (including Théodore Surville) would be shot by a squad of guardsmen in the Luxembourg Gardens, the battle would be all but finished. And by Monday morning, the corpses would number in the thousands and the prisoners in the tens of thousands. In only three days in February the republicans’ revolution had been won, and in only three days in June the socialists’ revolution would be defeated.
Heyday: A Novel Page 37