“What’s this, Theodore?” she asked. And her brother smiled.
“It’s a wicked book, Gretchen,” he warned her.
“Leaves of Grass,” she read. “Walt Whitman. Why have I heard of him?”
“He wrote a poem called ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ about the war, which got quite a bit of attention a couple of years ago. But this little book came before that, and caused something of a scandal. Interesting verse, though.”
Theodore glanced at Mary, and saw to his surprise that she was blushing. Since Whitman’s homoerotic verses had never, as far as he knew, been discussed much outside literary circles, he was rather curious as to how Mary would know about them. But he decided not to ask. Then the thought suddenly occurred to him that she might suppose that, reading such material, he harbored those tendencies himself.
“Whitman has genius, but I think Baudelaire’s even better,” he said. “Listen to this now.” He smiled at the two young women. “Imagine you’re on an island in the summer sun. Everything’s quiet, just the sound of the little waves on the shore. The poem’s called ‘Invitation au Voyage.’”
“But it’s in French,” Mary, who had recovered herself now, objected.
“Just listen to the sound of it,” he told her. And he began to read: “Mon enfant, ma soeur, Songe à la douceur, D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble…”
So Mary listened. She’d only been embarrassed for a moment when Theodore mentioned Walt Whitman. Not that she knew much about the man herself, but she did remember the name on account of a conversation she’d once overheard at the dinner table at the Masters’ house. So she knew that Mr. Whitman was considered an indecent man, and she had some idea what that might mean, and then she’d suddenly been embarrassed in case Theodore might suppose that she knew all about those sorts of people, and that had made her blush. But she wasn’t going to make a fool of herself again now, so she sat very still and listened.
Nobody had ever read a poem to her before, and certainly not one in French, but she had to admit that the poem’s soft, sensuous sounds did seem rather like the waves of the sea, and she supposed that if she spoke French she might find the poem just as wonderful as Theodore evidently did.
“Thank you, Theodore,” she said politely, when he had done.
And then Theodore suddenly said: “Let me show you some of my other work before you go.” Mary didn’t know what he meant, but while Theodore went over to a set of wide drawers and withdrew some folders, Gretchen explained.
“This means we’re honored, Mary,” she said. “Theodore takes portraits for a living, but he cares even more about his private work. He doesn’t often talk about it.”
When Theodore came back, he put the folders on the table in front of them and opened the covers. Soon Mary found herself looking at pictures which were entirely different from the portraits she’d seen. A few were pictures of individual people, one or two taken close up. Most were bigger, often in landscape format. There were scenes of the city streets and of the countryside. There were studies of alleys and courtyards where the light threw shadows across the image. There were pictures of ragamuffins and beggars. There were pictures of the busy docks, of the open harbor, of ships in the mist.
Mary wasn’t sure what to make of some of them, where the images seemed to her to be random. But a glance at Gretchen and the way she was studying them carefully told her that there must be some special observation at work, some organization of image that she herself had not yet understood. It was strange to look at Theodore, too. He was still the same young fellow with the wide-set eyes that she had always known, but the self-absorbed seriousness that had seemed so funny and endearing in his childhood had turned into something else now that he was a young man. There was a concentration and intensity in his face that reminded her of the look on Hans’s face when he had played the piano for her. And seeing the brother and sister together, sharing this art that she did not understand, she couldn’t help wishing that she could share these things with them too.
One picture in particular struck her. It was taken on the West Side, where the line of railroad tracks ran up alongside the River Hudson. Above, there were heavy clouds, whose gleaming edges seemed to echo the dull gleam of the metal tracks below. The river was not gleaming, though, but lay like a huge, dark snake beside the tracks. And upon the tracks, some close by, others already far in the distance, walked the sad, scattered figures of Negroes, leaving town.
It was a common enough sight, she had no doubt. The underground railroad, as everyone called it, had always brought escaped slaves up to New York. But now, with the Civil War raging, that trickle had turned into a flood. And when this tide of Negroes reached New York, they mostly found neither jobs nor welcome, so that, on any day, you might see them setting off up another kind of railroad, hoping maybe to catch a ride on a passing train, or at least walk along the iron road that led to the far north, in the hope of a warmer reception somewhere there.
With its strange, eerie light, the hard gleam of the tracks and the blackness of the river, the photograph captured perfectly the desolate poetry of the scene.
“You like it?” asked Theodore.
“Oh yes,” she answered. “It’s so sad. But …”
“Harsh?”
“I didn’t realize that a rail track like that”—she hardly knew how to say it—“could also be so beautiful.”
“Aha.” Theodore looked at his sister with a pleased expression. “Mary has an eye.”
They had to leave soon after that. But as the carriage took them southward toward the ferry, Mary turned to her friend and said: “I wish I understood photographs the way you do, Gretchen.”
Gretchen smiled. “Theodore taught me a little, that’s all. I can show you some things, if you want.”
The ferry left from near Battery Point, and the journey took a couple of hours. It was delightful, on a sunny day, to pass across the upper corner of the great harbor where the ships entered the East River. From there they followed the huge curve of Brooklyn’s shore until, reaching the narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, they sailed gradually out into the vast openness of the Lower Bay.
At one point, passing a small fort that lay just off the Brooklyn shore, one of their fellow passengers remarked: “That’s Fort Lafayette. They’ve got a bunch of men from the South in there. President’s holding them without charge and without trial.” Though whether he approved or disapproved of this violation of the Southern men’s rights the gentleman didn’t say.
Nor just then did Gretchen or Mary want to know about the fate of the prisoners. For as the salty Atlantic breeze caught their faces, and the ferry began to dip and roll excitingly in the choppy waters, they got their first glimpse, to the south-east, of the broad and sandy beaches of their destination.
Coney Island.
The quarrel between Frank Master and his wife the following afternoon went exactly as he planned. It was four o’clock when he got home and he found her in the parlor.
“Tom here?” he asked cheerfully. He was told their son was out. “Well, anyway,” he said with a smile, “it’s all fixed. He won’t be drafted. Paid my three hundred dollars and got a receipt. Then I went uptown to see how the draft was going. Didn’t appear to be any trouble.”
Hetty greeted this information with silence.
In the two years since the armed conflict between the Northern and Southern states of America had begun, all the Union regiments had been volunteers. Only recently had President Lincoln been obliged to order a draft. The names of all eligible males were put into a big lottery, and a selection made by a draw.
Unless you had money, of course. If you had money, you sent a poor person to fight in your place, or paid three hundred dollars to the authorities, who’d find someone for you.
To Frank Master it seemed reasonable enough. And it sure as hell seemed a good idea to young Tom, who had no desire to go down to the killing fields.
For if the upper classes of Europe were proud
of their military prowess, the rich men of the Northern states of America had no such illusions. In England, aristocrats and gentlemen, especially younger sons, crowded into the fashionable regiments, paid money for their officers’ commissions, and thought themselves fine fellows when they paraded in their uniforms. Were they not—in fact, or at least in theory—descendants of the barons and knights of medieval England? The aristocrat did not trade. He did not draw up your will, or cure you of sickness. God forbid. That was for the middle classes. The aristocrat lived on the land and led his men into battle. And in America, too, among the old landed families from Virginia southward, some echo of that tradition might still be found. But not in Boston, Connecticut or New York. To hell with that. Pay your money and let the poor fellow be killed.
The poor fellows knew it of course.
“It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” complained those who could not afford the fee. And the city authorities had been concerned that the draft might lead to some trouble.
Accordingly, that Saturday morning, they’d chosen to begin the selection at the Ninth District Headquarters, which was an isolated building set among some empty lots up at Third and Forty-seventh, well away from the main body of the city. Frank Master had gone up there to take a look, and found a large crowd watching the marshal draw names from a barrel. But they’d seemed quiet. And after a while, evidently relieved, the marshal had stopped, announcing that selection wouldn’t resume until Monday.
“You don’t look very pleased,” Frank remarked to Hetty.
Still his wife said nothing.
“You actually want Tom to go and fight in this damn fool war? Because he doesn’t want to, I can tell you.”
“He must make his own choice.”
“He did,” said Master firmly, in a voice that clearly implied: “So you’re on your own.”
If Frank and Hetty Master’s marriage had been under strain at the time of the Cooper Institute speech, events since had not made things any easier between them. Lincoln had become the Republican candidate, and he’d run a shrewd campaign.
“Whatever your mother believes,” Frank had explained to young Tom, “the truth is that people in the North are against slavery on principle, but they’re not that excited about it. Lincoln can include the slavery issue on his platform, but he knows he can’t win on it.” As the elections of 1860 had drawn near, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” was the Republican motto. Hard-working Northerners, supported by the government, should take over the western lands, build railways and develop industries, while the men of the South, morally inferior through their support for slavery, would be left behind. “He’s offering free land and government aid,” Frank had remarked drily. “A pretty good inducement for doing right.”
The election had been close, but Lincoln had squeaked in. Upstate New York had voted Republican. But not the people of Democratic New York City—they’d voted Lincoln down.
For whatever ticket Lincoln ran on, he was going to cause trouble with the South. And if the wealth of the merchants depended on the South, so did the jobs of every working man. Tammany Hall knew it. Mayor Fernando Wood knew it, and said so loudly. If Lincoln wanted to put the city’s jobs at risk, he declared, to hell with him.
The working men of New York weren’t too sure how they felt about the Republicans in general, either. Republican free farmers, with their notions of individual effort and self-help, were no friends to the working men’s unions, whose only bargaining power lay in their numbers. Working men suspected something else too. “If Lincoln has his way, there’ll be millions of free blacks—who’ll work for pence—headed north to steal our jobs. No thank you.”
Hetty Master was disgusted with this attitude. Frank thought it understandable. He was also proved right in his fears about the secession.
On December 20, 1860, South Carolina had left the Union. One after another, the states of the Deep South had followed. By February 1861, they were forming a Confederacy and had chosen a president of their own. Other Southern states were holding back from such a drastic step. But the secession states now saw an interesting opportunity. “If the Union’s breaking up,” they declared, “we can refuse to pay all the debts we owe to the rich boys in New York.” Delegations of merchants, both Democrat and Republican, went down from New York to Washington, anxious to find a compromise. Lincoln passed through the city, but satisfied no one.
It was Mayor Fernando Wood, however, who issued New York’s most striking threat. If Lincoln wanted war with the South, and the ruination of the city, then New York should consider another option.
“We should secede from the Union ourselves,” he announced.
“New York City leave the United States? Is he mad?” cried Hetty.
“Not entirely,” said Frank.
A free city; a duty-free port: the idea wasn’t new. Great European cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt had operated like independent states since the Middle Ages. The merchants of New York spent several weeks considering its feasibility, and it was actually the Confederacy in the South which had brought discussions to an end, with the move they made in March: the Southern ports would drop their customs duties.
“They’ll cut us out,” Frank announced grimly to his family, “and trade with Britain direct.”
There was nothing you could do after that. Reluctantly, New York City fell into line behind Lincoln. The next month, when Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter, the Civil War had officially begun. Either the South’s insurrection must be put down, argued Lincoln, or the Union of states built by the Founding Fathers would be lost. The Union must be preserved.
Since good manners can preserve a marriage, and he still felt affection for her, Frank Master did his best to be polite, and tried to avoid saying things that would upset his wife. For Hetty, however, the issue was more difficult. She loved Frank, but what does a woman do when her husband looks every day at a great evil and, for all his politeness, doesn’t seem to give a damn? Nor did it help that, when the war began, it proved that he had been right about the South seceding, and he could not help saying, “I told you so.” By the time the Civil War was in its first year, though their personal union endured, Frank and Hetty no longer looked at maps together or discussed the future. And in the evenings, where once they had often liked to sit on a sofa side by side, they would quietly take an armchair each, and read. Manners covered, but could not put out, the slow fire of their anger.
And sometimes, even manners failed.
Today, by throwing their son and the draft in her face, he’d deliberately annoyed her.
“You hate this war because you think only of profit,” Hetty said coldly.
“Actually,” he countered calmly, “this war has made me richer.”
He and many others. Partly it was luck. For after a few terrible months in 1861, when trade with the South had collapsed, fate had handed New York an unexpected bonus. The British grain harvest had failed—just as the Midwest had enjoyed a bumper crop. Massive quantities of wheat had flowed through the city, bound for England. The Hudson railroad and the dear old Erie Canal had proved their value a hundred times over. The city’s grain trade had been booming ever since, along with cattle, sugar and Pennsylvania oil for kerosene.
But, chiefly, Frank Master had discovered what his ancestors from the previous century could have told him: war was good for business. The army’s needs were huge. The city’s ironworks were at capacity, fitting warships and ironclads; Brooks Brothers were turning out uniforms by the thousand. And beyond that, wartime governments needed stupendous funds. Wall Street was making a fortune floating government bonds. Even the stock market was booming.
Hetty ignored his remark, and went on the attack again.
“Your slave-owning friends are going to lose.”
Was she right? Probably. Even after the wavering states like Virginia had thrown in their lot with the South, the contest was hopelessly unequal. If you looked at the resources of the two sides, the manpowe
r, industry, even the agricultural production of the North dwarfed that of the South. The strategy of the North was simple: blockade the South and throttle her.
Yet the South was not without hope. Her troops were brave and her generals splendid. Early in the war, at Bull Run, Stonewall Jackson had withstood the Union men and sent them scurrying back to Washington. General Robert Lee was a genius. Furthermore, while the Union troops were fighting to impose their will on their neighbors, the men of the South were fighting, on their own territory, for their heritage. If the South could hold out long enough, then perhaps the North would lose heart and leave them alone. True, Lee had been turned back, with terrible losses, up at Antietam last year, and General Grant had just smashed the Confederates at Gettysburg, but it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long way.
“The North can win,” Master acknowledged, “but is it worth the price? The Battle of Shiloh was a bloodbath. Tens of thousands of men are being slaughtered. The South is being ruined. And for what?”
“So that men can live in freedom, as God ordains.”
“The slaves?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Lincoln thinks slavery is wrong—that I don’t deny—but he went to war to preserve the Union. He made that perfectly clear. He has even said, in public: ‘If I could save the Union without freeing a single slave, I’d do it.’ His words. Not mine.” He paused. “What does Lincoln want for the slaves? Who knows? From what I hear, his main idea for liberated slaves is to find a free colony in Africa or Central America, and send them there. Do you know he actually told a delegation of black men, to their faces, that he doesn’t want Negroes in the United States?”
Fairly chosen or not, the fact that every one of these statements had some basis served only, as Frank knew it would, to rile Hetty more.
“That’s not what he means at all!” she cried. “What about the Proclamation?”
New York Page 51