The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  So the box appeared, George snatched it and slammed the door. “Never trust a rebel.”

  “God damn you!” came the voice from inside. “God damn you all.”

  Out in the street, Bennett Young was shouting at someone in the livery stable.

  And the Widow Mills was running down the street, frantically calling her daughter’s name.

  George wanted to tell her that the girl was safe, that her moments of anguish would be short, but she would know soon enough.

  He put the deposit box on the floor and fired into the lock. Another gunshot, barely noticed in the storm of gunshots outside. The box popped open, and there it was, a cylindrical leather map case. A quick look confirmed that it contained papers. Old papers. The first draft.

  George pulled off his duster and put on a teller’s stovepipe and black frock, which were hanging on a rack in the corner. He tucked the map case under his arm and sneaked out the side door.

  As the shouts and gunfire moved north, George went west, along an alley, though back yards, past laundry fluttering on clotheslines, and finally out onto Foundry Street, which paralleled the train yard. A freight was pulling in. An engine was steaming out. The platform was empty.

  George slipped between two cars on a siding, crossed a few tracks, hopped onto the platform. The message board said that the next Burlington train was due in two hours, too long to wait, because men were now running up Lake Street toward the sound of the firing. Soon any stranger would become a suspicious stranger.

  So George took a printed timetable from the little pocket on the board, walked across the yard, cut through a nearby wood lot, and came back onto Lake Street a quarter mile beyond the train yard.

  He whistled as he went, a gentleman in a tall hat strolling to the lake without a care in the world. But soon he was stopped by a group of men galloping toward the town. In his best Maine accent, he told them that he was a cousin of the Caldwells, and no, he hadn’t seen anything strange in town because he’d been out exploring all day. They believed him, or perhaps it was his accent they believed, and they rode on.

  And George walked on, to the end of the street and a little inlet called St. Albans Bay. He spied a pram on the beach, flipped it over, and found oars to row out to one of the little sloops riding at anchor.

  AN HOUR LATER, a man got off the Montreal train in St. Albans. He carried a leather satchel and favored his left foot. He had orders from C. C. Clay to present himself as “a buyer” to Dawson Caldwell, then to present himself to Bennett Young as a fellow agent and tell him exactly where Caldwell’s map case could be found, so that it could be stolen along with all the money in the banks. He was a day late, and since he brought no cash, much more than a dollar short.

  By then the banks in Burlington were under guard, and five hundred volunteers were in the cars, speeding north for the defense of St. Albans. Meanwhile a posse of fifty men, armed with pistols, bird guns, and old muskets had lit out after the raiders.

  But Bennett Young and his men made their escape into Canada by burning the covered bridge at Sheldon.

  It was the best blaze they started all day, because the Greek fire had done no more than scorch the sides of a few buildings and one St. Albans outhouse. However, the rebels had gotten away with over two hundred thousand dollars and shot three people. One, a contractor named Morrissey, died of his wounds. Some would comment on the irony of this, since he was a vociferous supporter of McClellan. Along those same lines, townspeople were soon speculating on the contents of a safety deposit box belonging to another McClellan supporter, Dawson Caldwell.

  Caldwell told a reporter for the Burlington Times that the box contained important family documents, deeds, and old letters. Had he revealed more, his meetings with the Confederate Commissioner for Canada might have come to light and cast suspicion on him for the raid itself. But Caldwell would tell no more, because the next day he succumbed to his wounds.

  GEORGE AMORY SPENT the night piloting the little sloop south, putting as much distance as he could between himself and St. Albans.

  With the sky silvering toward dawn, he sank the sloop in Mallet’s Bay, then rowed ashore in the pram, which he pushed back onto the water. A rising easterly wind caught the little boat and, with any luck, would push it all the way to the New York shore. Then his tracks would be covered completely.

  As the morning sun poured over his shoulder, he sat on a driftwood log on the deserted shoreline and slipped the top off the map case.

  He was a rational young man. He did not expect that light would burst from the case when he opened it or that the document would generate its own heat when struck by the rays of the morning sun. But he would not have been surprised.

  He wiped his hands down the front of his jacket and slipped his fingers into the cylinder lined with red baize. He felt the soft paper and the hard letters imprinted upon it. And then the four long folio sheets slid out, the literal handiwork of men imagining a nation into existence.

  Yes, he thought, the document really did generate heat.

  But as he read, he realized that it shed no new light. Nothing in it clarified the positions of Lincoln or the Secessionists. Nor did the scratchings left by any of the New Englanders. They wrote about free speech, religious freedom, the right to bear arms, all of which had been codified in the Bill of Rights. Only one of them had confronted slavery on the document, and all he wrote was “What about slaves? Ban importation by 1808?”

  So … could George say that he had saved the Union by this theft? That he had rescued his reputation? Or that he had simply endangered himself and a backward girl?

  There was nothing here to stop the war, nothing to guarantee Lincoln’s victory or defeat in the election, nothing to illuminate the thinking of the Founders on the great issue of the day.

  It was all as Caldwell had said it would be.

  At least George had the document, and there were still people in Brunswick who would be impressed, people in other places, too. Maybe that was all that mattered….

  HE THOUGHT IT best to stay off the trains, where they might be looking for a young man with a limp, so he bought a horse at the livery stable in Mallet’s Bay and headed east.

  He crossed the Connecticut River the next morning and followed the Tenth New Hampshire Turnpike into the mountains. By late afternoon he came to a crossroads village called Twin Mountain. From there, the road undulated into the Amonoosuc Valley, with the rockbound riverbed, mostly dry in autumn, undulating beside it.

  The high-country hardwoods had dropped their foliage, leaving behind the deep greens of spruce and pine. They darkened the mountains that crowded the river on the west, and they covered the hills that spread east toward the Presidential Range. It was the first time that George had come through the valley, and nothing—not Casco Bay in a storm, not the Maine wilderness, not even the Northern Lights above Fredericksburg—had ever seemed more majestic or primeval.

  Small wonder that city people were finding their way here in summer to drink in the vistas, fish in the streams, walk in the woods.

  THE WHITE MOUNTAIN House was white, a four-story hotel facing Mount Rosebrook and the setting sun. A man was sitting in a rocking chair, watching.

  “Evening,” said George. “I’m in need of lodging.”

  “You’ve come to the right place, and just in time.” The man stood. He had a fringe of white beard and the proprietary air of ownership. “Usually closed by now, and we’ll be closed for certain come the first of November.”

  “Thank you, Mr.—”

  “—White. Colonel John White of the White Mountain House, late of the U.S. Army. Been runnin’ this place since I mustered out after the Mexican War.”

  “I suppose you’ve seen a lot of changes since then.”

  Colonel White slipped his thumbs into his galluses. “Seen some. More comin’.” He jerked his head toward the windows behind him, toward three men sitting in the dining room. “Timber cruisers. They’re the reason we’ve stayed open.”


  George stepped into the hotel, signed the register, and heard a familiar voice roar from the dining room, “I don’t believe it.”

  Enos Turlock came limping out to greet George as old friends did when they met outside the framework of their friendship—with shouts of recognition, handshakes, and a burst of conversation that began as if it had stopped just the day before.

  What was George doing here? Passing through after cruising timber in Vermont.

  Why wasn’t Enos in Maine, opening Caldwell Camp #7 or #8? Because he had finally found a wife to keep him warm through the winter, so he had hired out as a timber cruiser himself, surveying woodlands after the leaves fell but before the deep snow.

  “You gents can have old home week in the dinin’ room,” said Colonel White. “We got a nice roast chicken comin’ out, last one of the season.”

  Enos ushered George to the table by the fireplace, beneath a menagerie of stuffed New Hampshire animal heads, and introduced him to two men who would have a greater impact on his fortunes than any he had ever met: Daniel Saunders and son Charles, members of the logging aristocracy and the New England aristocracy, too.

  Daniel Saunders was a gaunt, balding Bostonian with a pointed beard and the watchful eyes of an owl or a lawyer, which was his stock in trade. He was related by marriage to the late Nicholas Norcross, New England Timber King, and by ancestry and business to the Perkins family of Boston, New England investment royalty, so he also had money in the Pike Mill.

  He seemed a gentleman, too. Not the pasteboard kind who believed that all men were created equal except for those who—through dumb luck or lineage—were just a little more equal. Saunders was the genuine article—polite and forthright, with the good sense to treat Turlock as respectfully as he would have treated General Grant.

  The father’s lessons were not lost on the son. Young Charles, equally tall and gaunt, listened attentively, spoke politely, and asked smart questions.

  Once their mutual interests in timber and the Pike Mill became clear, they talked far into the night.

  The next morning, Saunders stood on the veranda of the hotel and offered George his hand. “It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Amory. I look forward to doing business with you some day.”

  “It’s my hope,” said George.

  “You own a thousand acres below the Notch”— Saunders walked to his horse—”and it’s surrounded by thirty thousand acres of land we’ve bought.”

  “He’s tellin’ you to come up with a price,” said Turlock.

  Saunders swung a leg over his saddle. “I plan to harvest the timber when the railroad comes, so … a fair price.”

  “I’d prefer partnership to a price,” said George. “A man needs to make something of himself more than he needs money.”

  “A fine philosophy,” said Saunders. “But a fair price is what I’m after.”

  As George watched them ride off, old Colonel White came up beside him. “Someday soon, the state’ll sell the timber rights in this whole valley, and men like Saunders will build their railroads, and this world will change.”

  “Change is inevitable,” said George.

  “Some of us come here because we don’t like change.” Colonel White looked at the old man bringing George’s horse around. “Live free or die is what we always say. Ain’t that so, Dewlap?”

  “Live free or die,” said the old man. “My pap done that here eighty years ago.”

  “Live free or die,” mused George. “The New England motto.”

  “Don’t know about New England,” White answered, “but it’s what we say in New Hampshire.”

  George rode out that morning, past the place where the Amonoosuc dropped down out of the mountains and made its turn for the Connecticut. He noticed a little farmhouse set back from the road. He wondered if that was where his grandfather had spent a winter, if it was in those woods beyond that his great-uncle was buried.

  As he passed the high rocks that formed the Gateway of the Notch, he tried to imagine the fight his grandfather had described. One of his ancestors had died right there, because of the document that he now carried. North Pike had died trying to live free. And men were still dying so that others could live free. They were dying for the North and for the South, and all because of the different ways that men read the same document.

  The turnpike road carried him down, over the Saco River, then over it again, then past the Willey House, destroyed by a landslide, immortalized in a story by Hawthorne. Another few miles brought him past the mansion called Notchland and the old Mount Crawford house, run by the family who had given their name to the Notch. Finally, about twelve miles from the Gateway, he came to the place were the Sawyer River dropped out of the mountains and joined the Saco. This was his land.

  He left his horse to water in the river while he walked a short distance up the grade and gazed at the tall trees that defined permanence. His permanence, his future, no matter what happened when he got back to Brunswick.

  ON THE LAST day of October, George stood at the edge of the Bowdoin campus and looked across the street at a Cape Cod-style house where a man was looking at a horse.

  Though the day was gentle and warm, in the melancholy way that only an October day can be when November threatens, the man wore a heavy blue cape, as if he feared taking a chill. His hair, beneath the blue forage cap, had gone gray. With slow and careful motions, he gripped the pommel of the saddle and tried to raise a leg into a stirrup. But pain and weakness seemed too much for him and he lowered the leg again. He put his hands on his hips and contemplated the animal.

  George crossed the street. “Can I give you a boost?”

  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain turned, as if he had been discovered at something he should not have been doing. Then his face brightened. “Why, Amory!” Then his expression darkened. “How’s the foot?”

  “It’s healed.” George offered his hand.

  Chamberlain took it a bit tentatively, but after a moment, he pumped it like an old friend. “It’s good … good to see you, George.”

  “I hear that you’ve been wounded a few times, too.”

  “In the foot, believe it or not, at Gettysburg. I always told people how easy it was to be wounded in the foot.”

  “A hard day.”

  “Not as hard as Petersburg.” Chamberlain looked down at his body, as thought it were someone else’s. “Bullet went in just below the right hip, exited just above the left. They thought I was going to die, so they breveted me on the field.”

  “Brigadier general now?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t ease the pain. Doctors say it’s a miracle I’m alive and can stand on my own two feet and pass my own water.”

  “It would be a miracle for you to ride a horse, too, I’d say.”

  “I’d best be able to do it, for when I go back.”

  “You’re going back?”

  That knowledge made the document that he carried, and whatever triumph it represented, seem much smaller to George Amory. There was nothing he could do, nothing he had found, to equal such service. So he left the map case on his saddle when Chamberlain’s wife invited him in for tea.

  They sat by the fireplace, and George felt an embrace of domesticity so warm and comforting that he could not comprehend why Chamberlain would leave it a second time.

  “It’s not out of selfish ambition.” Chamberlain rocked and looked at the fire. “What it is, I can’t tell you … a sort of fatalism, perhaps. I believe in destiny, George, divinely appointed. So …”

  They talked for an hour. Chamberlain assured him that Lincoln would win the election. George said he prayed that it would be so.

  Then George stood to leave. And once more, he thought of showing the draft to Chamberlain.

  But Chamberlain took his hand and said, “Remember what I told you once. Combat makes good men better and bad men worse. For you, it did the former. And now that I am a brigadier general, I can tell you that you would be welcomed back to the Corps.”


  And George Amory was tempted to accept the invitation. But he knew that he would never go back. He had given all that he could to the uniform. He knew as well, that the lost Constitution could prove nothing about him that he hadn’t proved about himself. In the eyes of men whose opinion mattered, George had value. No more needed to be said.

  As he left, the poet whispered again, “He who finds himself loses his misery.”

  ON THE WAY to Cordelia’s house, George began to wonder if he would even bother to show her the draft, or simply present himself, as himself, no more and no less. Matthew Arnold would approve.

  But when he struck the brass knocker, he had the map case under his arm.

  The maid led him into the study, where the broad-beamed Professor Edwards was writing in his diary.

  He had aged. His great belly, which he once carried so pridefully beneath his waistcoat, seemed now to weigh him down like rocks in a sack. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled, his emotion deep enough that he could not muster a greeting that was either welcoming or sarcastic. He simply said, “George Amory … how’s your foot?”

  “Healed,” said George. “Healed well enough that

  General Chamberlain has asked me to rejoin his brigade.” He could not resist.

  Edwards simply nodded, distracted.

  “Is … is Cordelia here?” asked George. “She invited me to come.”

  “She’s in Annapolis, at the hospital. Her husband … she has gone to him….”

  “Husband?” George tried not to stagger. But before he even opened the map case, he knew he had lost what he wanted most, what he had always hoped this treasure would win for him.

  “They married when she came back from Europe. He said he could not go into another battle without her complete love. Now …” Edwards waved a letter. “Her young man has … has lost his legs, perhaps his manhood…. She cannot be certain if he survives.”

  George had to get out. Twice in a day, his personal victory was overshadowed, first by the sacrifice of Chamberlain, now by this bitter news. So he withdrew a calling card from his pocket and left it with the professor.