And John Master was just about to give Jefferson a few choice words about the shortcomings of improvident gentlemen from the South when, seeing James and Weston’s embarrassed faces, he paused, and checked himself.
What was he thinking of? In a short while, his grandson would be departing for Harvard. James, too, would be departing, for God knows how many months, to England. Did he really want to incur James’s anger, and leave young Weston with the memory of his grandfather making a scene with the great Thomas Jefferson?
James’s journey was necessary. It was some years since Albion had retired from his business in London. Despite what he saw as Grey’s poor behavior, John Master had continued to do business with the senior Albion, but on his retirement the Masters had selected another agent, who had proved to be unsatisfactory. James was going over to London to find another. In a way, Master wished that his son were not going just now.
“You’re traveling to Europe at an interesting time,” he had remarked to him. But a dangerous one also, in his estimation.
When the news of the revolution in France had reached New York in the fall of 1789, many people had rejoiced, including James. Before long, James had received a letter from his friend the Count de Chablis. “He says that Lafayette and his friends are all supporting it. They want a new republic. America is their model.” Soon, even young Weston had been talking about the blessings of the new French freedoms—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It all sounded very fine. But not to John Master.
“It will end in a bloodbath,” he warned them. “Lafayette may dream of America—I dare say he does—but this French business isn’t the same at all. It’ll turn into a civil war, and civil wars get ugly.”
James did not agree. Chablis was confident, he told his father, that a compromise would be reached and that the French would soon be living with a limited monarchy, run by a parliament—something like England. John Master, however, had reminded James and Weston bleakly: “You forget the power of the mob. When there was a civil war in England, they cut off the king’s head.”
“You’re just a Tory, Grandfather,” Weston had said with a laugh.
“Take care, all the same,” Master had counseled James. “And stay away from Paris, whatever you do.”
He did harbor one other hope for James’s journey, though. No word had been heard from Vanessa for a long time. He supposed she was probably in London now. Though James had been having a discreet affair with a charming widow in New York for the last couple of years, Master hoped that his son might settle down with a new wife one day, but first his nonexistent marriage to Vanessa would have to be formally ended. Perhaps, he had gently suggested to James, this might be a useful business to attend to while he was over there.
So now, to restore peace and harmony, he bowed stiffly to Jefferson.
“I must apologize, sir, for my intemperate language,” he said politely. “And you must forgive me if I rise to defend the city where I was born. I am like a loyal husband, who defends his wife against criticism, even if he knows she has her faults.”
It was graciously said, and James looked relieved. Weston was glancing hopefully at Jefferson.
But Jefferson, who was not entirely without vanity, did not seem ready to reciprocate just yet. Tall, ramrod-straight, his finely hewn face still wore an expression of distaste. And it was while the brief silence persisted that Master, as much to reassure himself as anything, added one further thought.
“I am bound to say, sir, that whatever New York’s shortcomings, when you consider its position, its great harbor and its natural advantages, I hardly think it likely that a better capital could be found.”
And now a little gleam of triumph appeared in the great man’s eye.
“I believe you will discover,” he responded, “that the matter of America’s capital will soon be settled. And not,” he added firmly, “as you wish.”
“How so?” Master frowned. “Is Congress so anxious to return to Philadelphia?”
“Philadelphia is a fine city, and I should sooner be there than here. But I believe we shall build a new capital, further south.”
“Build a new capital?”
“Exactly.”
“That will cost Congress a great deal of money,” Master remarked drily. “I hope they can afford it. And may I ask where?”
“Down on the Potomac River.”
“The Potomac?” Master looked astonished. “But it’s all swamp down there.”
“Frankly, I’d sooner a swamp than New York,” said Jefferson, not without relish.
Could the Virginian be telling the truth? New York was to be abandoned in favor of a swamp? The idea seemed preposterous. Master glanced at his son. But James only nodded.
“That is the latest word, Father,” he said. “I just heard of it today. Philadelphia will be the interim capital, then everything will move to the new place.”
For a moment Master could scarcely believe them, as he looked from one to the other.
“Is this a joke?” he cried.
“No, Father,” said James. Behind him, Jefferson gave a faint smile.
And then, his good intentions all forgotten, poor Master burst out in a rage.
“Then damn your Potomac swamp, sir,” he shouted at Jefferson. “And damn you too!”
“I think,” said Jefferson to James, in a dignified manner, “it is time that I left.” And he turned. But Master would have the last word.
“You can do what you like, sir,” he cried, “but I’ll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.”
Niagara
1825
THE INDIAN GIRL watched the path. A number of men from the boat had already taken the trail through the woods. She had seen them emerge onto the big platform of grass and rock, and start at the sudden roar of the water.
She was nine. She had come to the mighty waterfall with her family. Soon they would continue into Buffalo.
Frank walked beside his father. It was a bright October day. Above the trees the sky was blue. They were alone, but he could tell from the crushed red and yellow leaves on the trail that many people had been that way.
“We’re nearly there,” said his father. Weston Master was wearing a homespun coat, which he’d unbuttoned. The mist had made it damp, but it was being warmed by the sun. He had tied a big handkerchief around his neck. Today he’d fastened a wampum belt round his waist. It was an old belt and Weston did not wear it often, so as to preserve it. He was carrying a stout walking stick and smoking a cigar. He smelled good.
Frank knew his father liked to have his family around him. “I don’t remember my mother at all,” he would say. “As for my father, he was away fighting when I was a boy. And after I went to Harvard, I never saw him again.” At home in the evening he’d sit in his wing chair by the fire, and his wife and five children—the four girls and young Frank—would all have to be there, and he’d play games or read to them. Weston would read amusing books, like Washington Irving’s tale of Rip Van Winkle, or the funny history of New York, told by his invented Dutchman Diedrich Knickerbocker. “Why is he called Diedrich?” he would ask. “Because he Died Rich,” the children would chorus.
Every summer, the whole family would spend two weeks with Aunt Abigail and her family in Westchester County, and another couple of weeks with their cousins up in Dutchess County. The more members of his family he had around him, the happier Weston Master seemed to be.
But last month, when the governor had invited him to come north for the opening of the big canal, Weston had said: “I’ll just take Frank with me.”
It wasn’t the first time Frank had been up the Hudson River. Three years earlier, soon after his seventh birthday, there had been a bad outbreak of yellow fever in New York. There was often some fever in the port. “The ships bring it from the south,” his father would say. “And we’re always at risk. New York’s as hot as Jamaica in the summer, you know.” But when a lot of pe
ople in the city had started dying, Weston had taken his whole family upriver to Albany until it was over.
Frank had enjoyed that journey. On the way up, they’d gazed west at the Catskill Mountains, and his father had reminded them: “That’s where Rip Van Winkle fell asleep.” Frank had liked Albany. The busy town was the capital of New York State now. His father had said this was a good idea, since Manhattan was at the bottom end of the state, and had plenty of business anyway, but Albany was nearer the middle, and growing fast. One day, Weston had taken them all to the old fort at Ticonderoga, and told them how the Americans had taken it from the British. Frank wasn’t very interested in history, but he’d enjoyed seeing the geometric lines of the old stone walls and the gun emplacements.
This time, after coming up the Hudson as far as Albany, Frank and his father had headed west. First they’d taken a coach along the old turnpike road across the northern lip of the Catskills to Syracuse, then along the top of the long, thin Finger Lakes, past Seneca and Geneva, and after that, all the way across to Batavia and finally Buffalo. It had taken many days.
Frank reckoned he knew why his father had brought him. Of course, he was the only boy in the family, but it wasn’t only that. He liked to know how things worked. At home, he enjoyed it when his father took him onto the steamboats and let him inspect their furnaces and the pistons. “It’s the same principle as the big steam-powered cotton gins they have in England,” Weston had explained. “The plantations we finance in the South mostly produce raw cotton, which we ship across the ocean to those gins.” Sometimes Frank would go down to the waterside to watch the men packing the cargoes of ice, so that it would stay frozen all the way down to the kitchens of the big houses in tropical Martinique. When the workmen had installed gas lighting in their house that spring, he’d watched every inch of piping as it went in.
So it was only natural, he supposed, that his father should have chosen him of all his children to accompany him now, to witness the opening of the huge engineering project in the North.
Weston Master took a draw on his cigar. The path was like a tunnel, but a short way ahead there was an arch of bright sky, where the trees ended. He glanced down at his son and smiled to himself. He was glad to have Frank with him. It was good for a boy to spend time alone with his father. And besides, there were some particular things he wanted to share with his son on this journey.
More than thirty years had passed since the unexpected death of his own father in England. The letter, which had come from old Mr. Albion, who had gone to some trouble to discover all the details of the affair, explained that he had been set upon by ruffians in the city, probably intent only upon theft. James Master had put up such a fight, though, that one of the fellows had struck him a terrible blow with a cudgel, from which he had not recovered. The news had not only come as a great shock to Weston, it had also set the seal on a prejudice that remained with him for the rest of his life. All through his New York childhood, for reasons he never quite understood, England had seemed to claim the mother who was missing from his home. It was the war with England, also, which kept his father away, and made the other boys at school call his father a traitor. And these wounds had only partly healed when this news came that, like some ancient god who can never be satisfied, England had taken his father’s life as well. Even though he was a rational young man at Harvard when it happened, it was not so surprising that a primitive sense of aversion to England and all things English had settled in his soul.
As time passed, the scope of this aversion grew wider. While he was at Harvard, at the time of the French Revolution, it had seemed to Weston that perhaps in that country, inspired by the example of America, a new European freedom might be dawning. But as the liberal constitution for which Lafayette and his friends had hoped gave way first to the bloodbath of the Terror, and then to Napoleon’s empire, Weston had concluded that the freedoms of the New World might never be possible in the Old. Europe was too mired in ancient hatreds and rivalries between nations. The whole Continent, in Weston’s imagination, was a dangerous place, and he wanted as little to do with it as possible.
He was in excellent company. Hadn’t Washington, in his farewell address, warned the new American nation to avoid foreign entanglements? Jefferson, that standard-bearer of the European Enlightenment, and former resident of Paris, had likewise declared that America should stick to honest friendship with all nations, but entangling alliances with none. Madison agreed. Even John Quincy Adams, the great diplomat, who’d lived in countries from Russia to Portugal, said the same. Europe was trouble.
Proof of their wisdom had come a dozen years ago, when Britain and Napoleon’s empire were locked in their great struggle and the United States, bound to France by a treaty of friendship, had found itself trapped between the conflicting powers. Weston had felt first irritation as Britain, unable to tolerate America’s neutral trade with her enemy, had started to harass American shipping; then despair, as the disputes grew into a wider conflict; and then fury when, in 1812, America and Britain had once again found themselves at war.
His memories of that war were bitter. The British blockade of New York harbor had nearly ruined his trade. The fighting all along the eastern seaboard, and up in Canada, had cost tens of millions of dollars. The damn British had even burned down the president’s mansion in Washington. When the wretched business finally drew to a close after three years, and Napoleon had left the stage of history, Weston’s relief was matched by an iron determination.
Never again should America be in such a position. She must be strong, like a fortress. Strong enough to stand entirely alone. Recently, President Monroe had taken the idea even further. To make America really secure, he had declared, the whole of the western side of the Atlantic—North America, the Caribbean, South America—should be an American sphere of influence. The other nations could squabble in Europe if they liked, but not in the Americas. It was a daring claim, but Weston was in total agreement with it.
For why should Americans need the Old World across the ocean, when they had their own, huge continent on their doorstep? Mighty river systems, rich valleys, endless forests, magnificent mountains, fertile plains—a land of endless opportunities, stretching westward beyond the sunset. The freedom and wealth of a continent, thousands of miles of it, was theirs for the taking.
And it was this great truth, this grand vision, that Weston wanted to impress upon his son on their journey west.
For New York at least, and for the Master family in particular, the great canal that had just been built was an integral part of this grand new equation. And before they had left the city, he’d tried to show Frank its importance. Spreading out a map of North America on the table in his library, he had pointed to some key features.
“See, Frank, here are the Appalachian Mountains, beginning way down in Georgia, and extending all the way up the eastern side of the country. In North Carolina they become the Smoky Mountains. Then they run right up through Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and into New York, where they become the Catskills first, and then the Adirondacks. The old Thirteen Colonies were all on the east side of the Appalachians. But the other side is the future, Frank. The great American West.” And he had grandly swept his hand across the map all the way to the Pacific.
The parts of the map that already belonged to the United States were colored. The territory in the far west, beyond the Rocky Mountains, was not. After the War of 1812, the Spanish had given up Florida, but their huge Mexican empire still swept all the way up the Pacific coast until it came to Oregon Country, the open territory which America and Britain controlled together. The vast swathe of territory east of the Rockies, however, from Canada all the way down to New Orleans, was colored. This was the Louisiana Purchase, as big as the old thirteen states put together, and which Jefferson had bought from Napoleon for a song. “Napoleon was a great general,” Weston told Frank, “but a lousy businessman.” Most of the Louisiana Purchase hadn’t been organized into states y
et, though Weston believed that that would come in time. It was the nearer west, however, under the Great Lakes, to which he had directed his son’s attention.
“Look at these new states, Frank,” he said. “Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—with Michigan territory above them, and the states of Kentucky and Tennessee below. They’re rich in everything, especially grain. The future breadbasket of the world. But New York doesn’t benefit. All the grain, and the hogs and the other goods from the west are flowing south, down the Ohio River, then down the Mississippi”—he traced the line of the huge river systems with his finger—“until they finally come to New Orleans for shipment.” He smiled. “So that, my boy, is why we have built the Erie Canal.”
Geography had certainly been kind to the New York men. Up near Albany, on the western side of the River Hudson where the Mohawk River came to join it, the huge, broad gap between the Catskills and the Adirondack Mountains offered a viable terrain through which to lay a canal. From the Hudson, the canal ran westward all the way to the edge of the Great Lakes in the Midwest.
“Here,” said Weston, “just below Lake Ontario and above Lake Erie, lies the town of Buffalo. All kinds of produce come in there. And the canal ends just below Buffalo.”
“So now we can use the canal to ship goods east instead of south?”
“Exactly. Bringing loads overland is expensive, and slow. But barges filled with grain can get from Buffalo to New York in only six days. As for the cost … that drops from a hundred to only five dollars a ton. It’ll change everything. The wealth of the West will flow through New York.”
“Not so good for New Orleans, I guess.”
“No … Well, that’s their problem.”
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