New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

“And you’ll be stuffing ballot boxes?”

  “Of course,” said Sean cheerfully.

  “Two hundred for him, and the same for you.”

  “You’re most understanding, sir.”

  Frank Master rose, left the room for a minute, and returned with a bundle of banknotes.

  “Cash acceptable?”

  “Certainly.”

  Master settled himself in his chair again, and puffed on his cigar.

  “We have a girl by the name of O’Donnell who works here, Mary O’Donnell,” he remarked easily.

  “It’s a common name,” Sean answered.

  Master continued to puff on his cigar.

  “My sister,” Sean said finally. “But she doesn’t know I’m here. Doesn’t approve of me, in fact.”

  “I think we treat her well.”

  “You do.”

  “She said there was a fellow bothering her. My wife told him not to come round any more.”

  “He won’t be troubling her again.”

  “And you don’t want me to tell Mary I met her brother?”

  “I’d prefer not.” Sean’s gaze went round the richly appointed room. Master watched him.

  “You know,” Master said quietly, “you Tammany boys didn’t invent the game. My ancestors were doing this kind of thing even before Stuyvesant was here. I reckon it’s the way cities always have been. Always will be, I dare say.” He nodded contentedly. “New crowd. Same game.”

  “So one day my grandson might be sitting in a place like this?”

  “Maybe. You seem like a coming man.”

  “I’d like that,” Sean said frankly. Then he grinned. “Perhaps even my sister would approve of me then.” He paused. “You’ve treated me very well, sir. I shall remember it. Especially considering the great difference between us.”

  Master took a slow draw on his cigar, sighting the young man through half-closed eyes.

  “Not so different, O’Donnell,” he said softly, “just dealt a better hand.”

  Lincoln

  1860

  WHEN HETTY HAD asked him to accompany her, Frank had almost refused. And when he did decide to go, it wasn’t really to please her, but because he supposed he’d better take a look at this damn fellow Lincoln, since he’d turned up in New York.

  The first time Frank Master had heard of Abraham Lincoln was a couple of years earlier, when Lincoln had made a name for himself in Illinois running for the Senate against Douglas, the Democratic incumbent. When the two men had held a series of public debates, the newspapers had covered them extensively, and since the principal subject of the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been the slavery question, Master had read the accounts carefully. Though Lincoln hadn’t taken the seat, it was clear to Frank that the fellow was a skillful politician.

  After that, however, Frank hadn’t paid much attention to the Illinois lawyer until this month when, as the election year opened, the influential Chicago Tribune had suddenly, and rather surprisingly, endorsed him for the presidency. So despite the fact that he shared none of his wife’s enthusiasm, and it was a chilly, damp February evening, he nonetheless set out with her to the Cooper Institute’s Great Hall at Astor Place. Since the hall was only a dozen blocks away down Third Avenue, they decided to walk.

  As they left Gramercy Park, he offered his arm, and Hetty took it. Years ago the gesture would have been the most natural thing in the world. God knows, Frank thought, how many miles they had walked arm in arm back in the early days of their marriage, when she was still the young woman who’d come with him to the Croton Aqueduct. But they seldom walked arm in arm nowadays, and as he glanced at her he wondered, when exactly had the coolness between them begun?

  He supposed it all went back to when she’d read that infernal book. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been no help to his marriage, that was for sure. It was amazing to Frank that the issue of slavery could have come between him and his wife; yet perhaps, he considered, he shouldn’t be so surprised when it had managed to divide the whole country. Nor was it only the rights and wrongs of the slavery question, but the profound difference in philosophy that the argument had revealed—a difference about which, at the end of the day, he could do nothing.

  If Hetty believed that slavery was wrong, Frank didn’t disagree with her. But to his mind, it wasn’t as simple as that. “We have to deal with the world as it is, not as it should be,” he would gently point out.

  It wasn’t as if the issue was new. Washington and Jefferson, both slave owners, had recognized the inconsistency of slave-owning with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Both had hoped that slavery would slowly disappear, but they also realized how difficult that would be.

  A few summers ago, Frank and Hetty had gone up the Hudson to the resort of Saratoga. At the hotel, they had got to know a charming family from Virginia who owned a small plantation. Frank had particularly liked the father, a tall, elegant, gray-haired old gentleman, who had been partial to sitting in his library reading a good book. They had enjoyed many hours of conversation, during which the Virginian had been very frank about the slave question.

  “Some people say that slaves are like the family servants of their owners,” he’d remarked. “Others say that slaves are treated worse than animals. In a way, both statements are true, because there are two kinds of slave plantation. In small plantations like mine, the slaves that work in the house are more like family retainers, I’d say. And I hope we treat the men in the fields kindly as well. But there’s a reason why we should. Back in the last century, remember, most slaves were imported. Slave owners might be considerate, or they might not—usually the latter, I’m afraid. But once they’d got all they could out of a slave, they just bought another one. Early in this century, however, when Congress ended the slave-importation business, slaves had to be home-grown, and their owners had an incentive to treat them as valuable livestock, if you like, rather than chattels to be worked to death. So you might have thought that would improve the lot of the slave.

  “Down in the Deep South, however, there’s another kind of plantation entirely. Those are huge—like vast factories—and there a slave may still be worked to death.” He’d nodded grimly. “The most similar conditions I can think of are in the industrial factories and coal mines in England, where the workers are hardly better off, though they are at least paid a pittance. The only difference is that—in theory at least—the English poor have some rights, whereas, in practice, the slaves have none. Those big plantations, sir, eat up slaves and need fresh ones all the time. And where do they get them? Mostly from further north. Sold down the river, as they say. Virginia ships huge numbers every year.”

  “Do you?”

  “No. But I haven’t so many slaves, and unlike some of my neighbors, I’m not in need of cash. Otherwise, the temptation would be enormous.” He had sighed. “I’m not defending the system, Master. I’m just describing it. And the sad truth is that the big planters in the South need slaves, and many farmers in Virginia rely on the income they get from supplying them.”

  “Yet the plantation owners are a tiny minority,” Frank had pointed out. “Most of the farmers in the South have few slaves or none at all. Do they have such an incentive to support the system?”

  “A white man in the South may be poor, but at least he can look down on the black man. He also has two great fears. The first is that if ever the black slaves become free, they’ll take a terrible revenge. The second is that free black men would steal jobs from him and compete for land. For better or worse, Master, the wealth of the South is all tied up in slaves, and so is its culture. Destroy slavery and the South believes it will be ruined. For the fact is that the South has always feared the dominance of the North. They don’t want to be under the thumb of your ruthless New York money men, or your arrogant Yankee puritans.” He had smiled. “Even such kindly ones as your wife.”

  When it came to anything mechanical, Frank Master had always been excited by whatever was new and daring. But in
political matters, like his Loyalist great-grandfather, he was naturally conservative. If the South was wedded to slavery, then he’d rather look for compromise. After all, that’s what Congress and the government had been doing for the last half-century. Every effort had been made to preserve the balance between the two cultures. As new slave states like Mississippi and Alabama had been created, they had been matched by new free states in the North. When Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state three decades ago, the free state of Maine had been created out of northern Massachusetts to keep the balance even. Conversely, free Hawaii had failed to become a state because of opposition from the South; though slave-holding Cuba had nearly been annexed as a new slave state several times.

  As for the issue of slavery itself, wasn’t it best to ignore it for a while? Even in the North, most states still reckoned the black man was inferior. Negroes in New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania might be free, but they couldn’t vote. In 1850, the Fugitive Act had made it a federal crime, even up in Rhode Island or Boston, if you didn’t turn over an escaped slave when his Southern owner claimed him. Such awkward compromises might enrage the moralists and abolitionists, but in Frank Master’s opinion, they were necessary.

  And that was the difference between him and Hetty. Frank Master loved his wife for her intelligence and strength of character. She’d been his intellectual partner in everything. He understood that if she believed strongly in something, she couldn’t remain silent, and he was not surprised when she joined the abolitionist cause. But if he could agree with her that the abolitionists were morally right, that did not make them wise.

  At first, when she had argued with him, he had tried to smooth things over. But as time passed, she became more passionate. One day, returning from a meeting at which a powerful abolitionist minister had preached, she had even gone down on her knees to him and begged.

  “Slavery is an evil, Frank. You know in your heart that it is so. Please join with me—others like you have done so. We cannot let this continue.” For her, the issue was so profound, so much a question of personal morality, that it was impossible not to take a stand. But he could not, and would not.

  Gradually, therefore, without desiring it, she had come to think less of her husband. And he, sensing that her respect for him was diminishing, drew somewhat apart. Sometimes they had arguments. It was true, for instance, that a number of merchants and bankers in the city, moved by the moral arguments of the preachers, had become abolitionists. But most had not. New York shipped the cotton, supplied the finance and sold all manner of goods to the slave-owning South. Was he supposed to tell his friends to ruin themselves? Frank asked. They should find other trade, she said.

  “Or look at the English,” he pointed out. “They are entirely against slavery, but the cotton mills of England aren’t closing because the cotton’s picked by slaves.”

  “Then they are despicable,” she replied. And since these judgments, he supposed, must equally apply to him, Frank felt a mixture of hurt and impatience with his wife.

  During the few years, as the relations between the North and South had grown worse, he had refused to be swayed by any of the rhetoric. And when the great dispute had arisen, not over the states, but the territories beyond them, he had insisted on analyzing the question as calmly as if it had been a practical problem of engineering.

  “I love railroads,” he’d remarked to Hetty one day, “but it’s really the railroads that have caused all this trouble.” Everyone had agreed that the Midwest needed railroads, and in 1854 the leading men of Chicago had reckoned it was time to build transcontinental lines across the huge, untamed tracts of Kansas and Nebraska. The only problem had been that none of the railroad companies would undertake the investment until Congress organized those wild western lands as proper territories. And it was surely a pity, Frank thought, that after a struggle, Congress had yielded to Southern pressure and granted that slavery should be allowed in these territories. “It’s a foolish decision,” he’d pointed out at the time. “There are hardly any slaves in those territories, and the majority of settlers don’t even want them.” But this was politics, and reality was not the point. In no time, the overheated politics of North and South had taken over.

  “The Nebraska Territory reaches right up to the Canadian border,” the North complained. “The Southern slavery men are trying to outflank us.” And when the new, Northern Republican Party had been formed to keep slavery out of the territories, its leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, were soon wondering openly whether the South mightn’t try to make slavery the law of the whole nation. “These Northerners would abolish slavery and make the poor white man no better than a Negro,” the Democratic Party roared back from the South.

  Some proposed that the territories should be able to decide for themselves whether they should be “free soil” territories or allow slavery. Northern reformers sent free soil settlers into Kansas; the South sent in slave holders. Before long there was bloodshed. Even in Washington, a Southern representative beat a Northern senator over the head with his cane.

  It was then, with horrible timing, that the Supreme Court gave the South an unexpected present. In its Dred Scott decision, the court announced that Congress hadn’t the right to bar slavery from any territory, and that the Founding Fathers had never intended that black men should be citizens in the first place. Even Frank was shaken. Hetty was outraged.

  Finally, to add fuel to the fire, John Brown had raided the armory at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, in the foolish hope of starting a slave uprising. The thing was doomed to failure from the start, and Brown had been hanged by the State of Virginia. But in no time Hetty had informed Frank: “John Brown was a hero.”

  “He was not a hero,” Frank had protested. “He was a madman. His attack at Harper’s Ferry was completely hare-brained. You also seem to forget that he and his sons had already murdered five men in cold blood, just for being pro-slavery.”

  “You just say that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  As 1860 began, relations between North and South had never been worse. And there was one other factor that, in Frank’s estimation, made the situation even more unstable.

  Frank Master had lived long enough to realize that the great transatlantic economic system, like the weather, had great cycles of its own. From boom to bust, it went round in a circle, always finishing up bigger than it had before, but subject to crisis every few years, and with each crisis, merchants were destroyed, but if one was prudent, the bust could be as profitable as the boom.

  For a while now, the transatlantic system had been going through stormy economic weather. But not everyone had suffered—his own business had even managed to prosper. The people who had been entirely unaffected, however, were the big Southern planters. Boom or bust, the world seemed to need more and more cotton. The big planters had never done better.

  “Cotton is king,” they could say triumphantly. And so confident were they in the good fortune of the South that some voices could even be heard declaring: “If the Yankees elect a Republican to ruin us, then to hell with the Union. Let the South go it alone.”

  Few in the North took it seriously, of course. “Those Southern braggarts are absurd,” Hetty remarked contemptuously. But Frank was not so sure.

  The coming presidential election, in his opinion, could be a dangerous business. Whatever the Chicago Tribune might say, he thought it unlikely that Lincoln would be the Republican candidate. Others surely had stronger claims. But he was quite curious, nonetheless, to take a look at this Lincoln fellow, and see what he was like.

  The huge, dark red mass of the Cooper Institute occupied a triangular site between Third Avenue and Astor Place. Frank had always admired its founder, Peter Cooper, a self-taught industrialist who’d built America’s first railroad steam engine before founding this splendid college to provide free night classes for working men and day classes for women. The most impressive part of the place, in Frank’s opinion, was the G
reat Hall. It was only last year that he’d come there for the Cooper Institute’s official opening, but already the Great Hall had become one of the most popular places for holding meetings in the city.

  They arrived in good time, and it was as well that they did, for the hall was rapidly filling. Glancing about, Frank made a quick estimate, and remarked to Hetty: “Your man can certainly draw a crowd. There’ll be fifteen hundred people here tonight.”

  The minutes passed, and Hetty seemed quite happy to look around at the crowd. Here and there she saw people she knew. Frank contented himself with calling to mind as many items as he could from the reports of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. After a while, he could not resist bringing up one of them.

  “Your Mr. Lincoln believes in freedom and equality for the black man, doesn’t he, Hetty?”

  “He certainly does.”

  “Yet in the Illinois debates, I distinctly remember, he said that on no account would he give the black man the vote or allow him to serve on a jury. What do you think of that?”

  Hetty looked at him steadily. “I think that’s very simple, dear. If he said anything else, he could never get elected.”

  Frank was just about to point out that she seemed happy to make moral compromises if it suited her, when a movement at the side of the stage signaled that the proceedings were about to begin.

  The gentleman who introduced the speaker did not take long about his business. Some brief, polite words about the distinguished speaker, the hope that they would accord him a good welcome, and find interest in what he was to say, and the introduction was done. He turned to bid the speaker come forward. And Abraham Lincoln appeared.

  “Good God,” muttered Frank, and stared.

  He’d seen one or two pictures of the man in the newspapers, and assumed they were unflattering. But nothing had quite prepared him for the shock of seeing Lincoln for the first time in the flesh.

  Across the stage, walking stiffly and somewhat stooped at the shoulders, came a very tall, thin, dark-haired man. Six foot four, at least, Frank guessed. His long frock coat was black. One gangling arm hung at his side, the other was bent, for in a huge hand, he carried a sheaf of foolscap papers. When he reached the rostrum in the center of the stage, he turned to the crowd. And Frank almost gasped.