by John Jakes
Charles returned his gaze to the uniform on the stand. “I just can’t get over the idea that you can fight and get paid for it.”
Orry held his breath. Was this the right moment? He seized on it.
“Charles—here’s a thought. It’s possible that we could secure an Academy appointment for you.”
“But—I’m not smart enough.”
“Yes, you are. You just don’t know enough to pass the entrance examinations. In other words, you have the intelligence but not the facts. Herr Nagel could certainly give you those in the next year or so. You’d have to apply yourself, but I know you can do it if you have the desire.”
Stunned by the new future he had glimpsed, Cousin Charles sat a moment before answering.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“First-rate! I’ll corner Nagel in the morning.”
“What?” the tutor cried when he heard Orry’s plan. “Instruct him? I should say not, Herr Main. The first time I reprimand him for failing to complete an assignment, he will whip out that gigantic knife and pfut!” Nagel’s thumb slashed across his throat. “Thus ends my brilliant academic service to this family.”
“Charles has changed,” Orry assured him. “Give him a chance. I’ll pay you a bonus.”
On that basis Herr Nagel was happy to gamble. At week’s end he came back to his employer with a stunned look.
“You are absolutely right. The transformation is astonishing. He remains stubborn and irritable over some things—chiefly his own unfamiliarity with concepts he should have learned long before this. But he’s quick. I believe I can bring him along rapidly, though naturally it will require some, ah, extra effort.”
“For which you’ll receive extra compensation every week.”
“You are too kind,” Herr Nagel murmured, bowing. “We shall make a scholar of that one yet.”
There was exhilaration in Orry’s voice and a sparkle in his eyes. “We just want to make him a West Point cadet. There’s going to be a professional soldier in this family.” To himself he added, “After all.”
At the end of the first week of April, Orry went to his father. “In two or three years, Charles should be ready to enter the Academy. I’ve learned there’ll be a vacancy at that time. It isn’t too early to secure the appointment for him. We might start with a letter to the War Department. We could ask Senator Calhoun to transmit it. Shall I write it, or will you?”
Tillet showed him a copy of the Mercury. “Calhoun’s dead.”
“Good God. When?”
“The last day of March. In Washington.”
It shouldn’t have come as a great surprise, Orry realized. Calhoun had been failing for a long time, and politically the past month had been one of the stormiest in recent history. Henry Clay’s compromise resolutions had come up for Senate debate. Because Calhoun was the South’s senior spokesman, his reaction, although predictable, was widely awaited. But he’d been too ill to take the floor. Senator Mason had read his remarks for him. Of course Calhoun denounced the Clay program and warned again that Northern hostility was making secession attractive to Southerners. Over the years Calhoun had moved steadily away from a nationalistic position to one that put the welfare of his section first. Most Southerners agreed that he had been driven to this hardened and parochial stand by the activities of the abolitionists, both in and out of Congress.
Three days after Calhoun’s speech was presented, Senator Daniel Webster had risen to plead the opposite view. He had spoken eloquently in favor of the resolutions and of the urgent need to put preservation of the Union above all else. The speech was too full of goodwill and the spirit of compromise for many of Webster’s Northern colleagues, who promptly began vilifying him. Tillet, too, called Webster’s seventh of March address an abomination—though not for the same reasons the abolitionist senators did.
But at the moment Orry was thinking of Calhoun from another perspective. “The senator was one of the Academy’s staunchest friends.”
“Once,” Tillet snapped. “He was also a friend of the Union. So were we all. Then the Yankees turned on us.”
Tillet seemed to suggest the attack had been causeless. Orry thought of Priam but said nothing. The unexpected pang of conscience surprised and troubled him. His father went on:
“It wasn’t merely old age and sickness that killed John Calhoun. It was Jackson, Garrison, Seward—that whole damned crowd who opposed him, and us, in everything from nullification to the way we earn our bread. They harried Calhoun like a pack of mad dogs. They exhausted him.” Tillet flung the newspaper on the floor. “It won’t be forgotten.”
Orry remained silent, upset by his father’s unforgiving tone.
A few weeks later Tillet had further cause for outrage. A slave who had run away from a plantation near Mont Royal was recaptured in Columbus, Ohio, by a professional slave catcher. The slave catcher had been hired by the owner of the runaway.
Before the man and his prisoner could leave Columbus, abolitionists intervened. They threatened the slave catcher with lynching and took the escaped black into protective custody, saying it was necessary for a court to rule on the legality of the claim. That was a subterfuge; they knew the court had no jurisdiction. But the delay gave them time to spirit the runaway out of jail. A rear door was mysteriously left unlocked. The fugitive was over the border and safe in Canada before most people knew about it. The unsubtle intrigue in Ohio outraged the slave’s owner and many of his neighbors. Tillet talked of little else.
Orry, meantime, shared his personal happiness with Madeline. Cousin Charles had settled down to studies with Herr Nagel, and Orry could hardly stop boasting about his protégé’s progress.
“We’ll have to suspend the lessons for two months this summer, though.” It was a clumsy way to introduce another subject that was on his mind, but it had to be done.
“Charles is leaving?”
“Along with the rest of us. I’ve leased a summer cottage in Newport, near George’s place.”
“You’ll have your reunion at last!”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Orry, how exciting.” Her response seemed genuine. If she felt disappointment, she hid it well.
“You won’t miss me?”
“Don’t tease. I’ll miss you terribly. Those two months will be the longest of my life.”
She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so passionately that the little volume of Cullen Bryant’s poems slipped off her lap unnoticed. After she caught her breath she said, “But I’ll survive. That is, I will as long as I know you’ll come back to me. I couldn’t bear it if you took up with some Yankee girl.”
“I’d never do that,” Orry replied with that humorless sincerity Madeline found touching sometimes; on other occasions, for no reason she could explain, it infuriated her. He went on, “It’s time Charles got a peek at the world beyond the borders of South Carolina. If he goes to the Academy, he’ll meet all sorts of people with new and different ideas. That can be a shock. It was to me. He must be prepared.”
She touched his face. “You sound more like a father every day.”
“Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Nothing.” She gave his cheek a wifely peck. “It’s grand for Charles, but he’s not the only one getting benefits from this new relationship—not by any means. You’re so much happier. That makes me happy, too.”
When she kissed him this time, it was to demonstrate the sincerity of what she had just said. A few moments later, as she was leaning down to retrieve the book, a question occurred to her.
“You say the entire family’s going to Rhode Island?”
“Not Cooper, of course.”
“That’s what I meant. Was the choice to stay home his or your father’s?”
Cooper had visited Mont Royal two nights ago. He and Tillet had been unable to stay in the same room without quarreling violently over the Clay resolutions. Orry’s smile disappeared.
“Both,” he said.
22
COOPER MAIN LOVED CHARLESTON.
He loved its narrow, cobbled streets, which reminded many visitors of Europe; the expensive merchandise sold in its shops; the peal of bells from all the white church spires that had weathered salt air and sea gales for so many years. He loved the political rhetoric overheard in the saloon bar of the Charleston Hotel; the clatter of the drays whose drivers were constantly being fined for racing through the streets at dangerous speeds; the glow of the street lamps after one of the two municipal lamplighters, or one of their half-dozen slaves, had passed by. And he loved the house he had bought with some of the first year’s profits of the Carolina Shipping Company.
The house was on Tradd Street, right around the corner from the famous old Heyward residence. It was a typical Charleston house, designed for coolness and privacy. Each of its three floors had a piazza, and each piazza ran the length of the building, or about sixty feet. The house was twenty feet deep, the width of a single room, and was situated on the lot so that one long side was flush with the public sidewalk.
Although the house was entered from this side, the opposite one facing the garden was considered the front. Cooper called the garden his second office. Behind a high brick wall he often worked for hours on company matters, surrounded by the seasonal beauties of azaleas and magnolias and the contrasting greens of the crape myrtle and the yucca. He thought it a shame that he lived in such a beautiful house all by himself.
But he didn’t think of that often; he was too busy. He had turned his quasi-exile into a triumphant success along with the little cotton packet company. He was now in the process of doubling the company’s warehouse space by means of an addition. He never consulted his father about such decisions. Tillet still thought of the Carolina Shipping Company as a burden, a financial risk. That left Cooper free to run it his way.
The company’s headquarters, warehouse, and pier were located on Concord Street, above the U.S. Customs House. The company symbol, appearing on a signboard in front as well as on the ensigns of its two rickety packets, was an oval of ship’s line surrounding three shorter pieces of line arranged to represent the letters C.S.C.
Cooper knew Charleston would never be the cotton port, as it had once been the rice port. Alabama and Mississippi dominated cotton production now. But Charleston still shipped a respectable tonnage, and Cooper wanted an ever bigger share for C.S.C. For that reason, a few months ago he had mortgaged everything and placed an order with the Black Diamond Boat Yard of Brooklyn, New York, for a new packet of modern, indeed advanced, design.
She would be driven by a screw propeller, not side wheels. Below decks, three transverse bulkheads would create four compartments that could be made watertight. In the event the hull was breached on coastal rocks, cargo in the undamaged compartments could be saved.
The bulkheads added substantially to the cost of the packet. But Cooper had already described the innovation to a couple of local cotton factors, and their reaction had been so positive he knew the extra expenditure would give his vessel an edge over its competition—and never mind that packets didn’t run aground that often. It was the provision for what might happen that influenced a factor’s choice of a ship.
A break in the hull was even less likely because of a second unusual feature—the use of iron instead of wood. Hazard Iron would supply a special run of plate for the hull.
Cooper was proud of the design of the new packet, which was to be christened Mont Royal. Before drawing up a list of features and performance specifications and taking them to Brooklyn, he had spent months reading up on naval architecture and filling sketch pads. Black Diamond’s president said that if Cooper ever tired of Charleston, they would hire him—and it wasn’t entirely a joke.
Cooper had little trouble arranging financing for his project. Although the Charleston bankers didn’t care for his political views, they liked his business ideas, his confidence, and his record thus far. He had already increased the volume of C.S.C. by eighty percent and its profits by twenty. He had accomplished it by refurbishing the old packets so that they were more dependable and by offering discounts to factors who placed a large part of their business with him.
In addition to the Concord Street property, C.S.C. now owned another piece of real estate—a twenty-five-acre parcel of land on James Island, across from the peninsula on which the city stood. The parcel had water frontage of one-half mile and was located not far from abandoned Fort Johnson. Cooper had acquired this seemingly worthless land as part of a long-term scheme he had kept secret from everyone. He wasn’t afraid of being laughed at; he simply felt that the prudent businessman kept good ideas private until it served his interest to make them public. Now, at twilight on the first Monday in May, he strolled the Battery and gazed at his real estate there beyond the open water. He continued to believe his decision to buy had been right. It might be years before he could put that land to use, but use it he would.
Tucked under his arm he carried the latest edition of the Mercury. The paper’s extremism repelled him, but it covered city and state matters in adequate fashion. One front-page article told the harrowing story of an old woman suffocated in her bed by two house slaves she had reprimanded. The slaves had disappeared and were still at large; the paper editorialized about the rebellious tendencies of Negroes and how those tendencies were being inflamed by Northern propaganda. Cooper never had any trouble understanding the state’s collective nervousness about its large Negro population.
Another article described several new fire laws. Charleston was always enacting fire laws in an effort to stave off another blaze like that which had threatened to raze the city in ’38. In the margin beside this article Cooper had jotted a list of things he needed for his trip north tomorrow.
Charleston was approaching a population of twenty-eight thousand people, slightly more than half of them white. In addition to the old aristocracy, there were sizable groups of turbulent Irish, clannish Germans, tradition-minded Jews. The city’s spires and rooftops, interspersed with great oaks and palmettos, looked lovely in the dusk. The pleasant prospect, coupled with the bracing salt air, reminded him of a vow he had made to himself months ago. This would be his home for as long as he lived. Or at least until his political views got him run out by a mob.
With a tart smile, he turned from the city to the vista he loved even more—the harbor and the great ocean beyond. Charleston harbor remained one of the Federal government’s strongest coastal installations; virtually everywhere you looked there was a fort. Away on his left lay Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. Closer, on a mud flat, he could see Castle Pinckney. Straight ahead rose the bulk of Fort Sumter, and over on James Island the forlorn old buildings of Fort Johnson.
The various forts didn’t thrill Cooper at all. What thrilled him day in and day out was the steamship traffic in the harbor. In a relatively short time he had developed a profound love for ships and for the sea that carried them.
The land at his back seemed old, frozen in a pattern fixed centuries before. The land was yesterday, obsolete or nearly so, but the sea with all the restless steam vessels it bore was a modern realm of speed, endless discovery, endless possibility. The sea was tomorrow.
And in some unexpected, almost inexplicable way, Cooper had ceased to be a man of the land and had become a man of the sea. He loved that too.
Cooper rode the train to New York, there spending two weeks at a shabby hotel near the Black Diamond yard. His packet was already under construction; the transverse bulkheads would be finished before the month was out.
He made numerous drawings of the vessel and the construction site, and filled whole booklets of notes before hurrying away with feelings of relief. The twin cities of Brooklyn and New York made Charleston appear drowsy and backward. Their size and their bustling, aggressive citizens intimidated him.
He boarded a train for Pennsylvania. The number of railroads operating out of New York seemed to have increased tenfold since his last visit. By way of
contrast, the famous “Best Friend” of Charleston, the first locomotive built for service in America, had made its historic run nearly twenty years ago—December 1830. Three years after that the entire Charleston and Hamburg line went into operation, 136 miles of track running all the way to the head of navigation on the Savannah River. Cooper thought it a sad irony that railroad building was now lagging in the state that had pioneered it. The Yankees were out to become the railroad kings, just as they wanted to be the kings of every other major industry.
When Cooper arrived in Lehigh Station, George took him into the mill and showed him some of the plate destined for the hull of Mont Royal. Above the roar George shouted, “A lot of naval architects still scoff at plate for ships. But it’s the coming thing.”
Cooper yelled a reply, but George didn’t hear it. “That British engineer,” he went on, “Brunel. He built Great Britain out of iron, and she had no trouble with Atlantic crossings. Brunel swears that one day he’ll build an iron ship so big that Great Britain will look like a speck beside her. So you’re in excellent company.”
“I know,” Cooper called back. “Mont Royal’s actually a scaled-down version of Brunel’s ship.” The idea of an adaptation had come to him when he first read a description of Great Britain.
George showed his visitor the entire Hazard complex, greatly expanded since Cooper had seen it last. The huge blast furnaces, the finery and plate mill, the new rail-rolling installation—all were running at capacity, George said. The streams of molten iron, which gave off clouds of sparks, blinding light, and hellish heat, intimidated Cooper even more than the cities he had recently quit. In the fire and noise of Hazard’s he again saw the growing industrial might of the North.
That power and the teeming crowds in the cities lent a ludicrous quality to the South’s posturings about independence. Why didn’t the Carolina hotspurs spend a week up here? They would soon see it was the North, and only the North, that provided most of what they used, from structural iron to farm tools; from hairpins for their wives and mistresses to the gunmetal of the very weapons with which some of them proposed to defend their preposterous declarations about a free and separate South.
