Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Menken continued to frequent Pfaff’s, but without Heenan in tow. The boxer would have been woefully out of place at Clapp’s long table, as a hulking bruiser who favored dandyish dress—striped trousers and a silk top hat. By all accounts, Heenan was an impressive physical specimen, but not an agile wit. On other evenings, however, Menken accompanied her secret husband to his haunts, taverns such as the Old Crib and the Exchange. Menken thrilled at rubbing shoulders with bookies and roughs, people steeped in a world of boxing, cockfights, and heavily wagered battles between huge, ferocious rats. At Manhattan’s Sporting Museum, Menken even took boxing lessons and did some sparring in a hidden back room where an illicit boxing ring was set up. This was a shocking activity for a nineteenth-century woman. Like Whitman, Menken valued keeping her life in separate compartments. She craved experience, big experience, and was able to move between the utterly incongruous worlds of Pfaff’s and the Old Crib.

  On January 4, high noon, Menken stood on a dock in Jersey City, watching as Heenan boarded the steamship Asia, bound for Liverpool. There was no question of her going along to England. She had her acting and poetry career to tend to. What’s more, a convention existed, then as now, that boxers should abstain from sex while training. “Spirits, porter, gross feeding, stimulants, tobacco, onions, pepper and sexual intercourse must vanish,” counsels Fistiana; or, The Oracle of the Ring, a boxing manual of the day. The plan was for Heenan to spend a few months in England, preparing for and then fighting his match, before returning to America, more famous than ever, with a nice payout as well. (The winning boxer would receive £400, equivalent to nearly $500,000 in current US dollars.)

  As Menken saw Heenan off on that January day, she held yet another secret, one she’d kept even from her new husband. She was pregnant with his child.

  Meanwhile, the darkness continued to gather as the North and the South traded harsh words and warned of worse, much worse. Already, America’s sectional divide had proved more than empty posturing. There had been the violence in Kansas Territory and John Brown’s raid.

  A pair of battling books heightened the tension. Above the Mason-­Dixon line, sensation attended a fresh publication of Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. The book had originally appeared in 1857 to little notice. But now it was an election year. The Republican Party—only six years old, founded explicitly to stem slavery—got behind Helper’s book and was in the process of distributing one hundred thousand copies. Helper’s book brimmed with incendiary language. He called slaveholders “tyrannical” and “lords of the lash” before delivering such provocations as “The first and most sacred duty of every Southerner, who has the honor and interest of his country at heart, is to declare himself an unqualified and uncompromising abolitionist.” What made the book especially controversial: Helper was himself a Southerner, excoriating his own region.

  The slave states answered with The Sunny South. This book took the form of a series of unsigned letters, celebrating idyllic plantation life, purportedly written by a Northern governess who had relocated to Mississippi.

  The rhetoric was growing ever more heated. On February 5, 1860, Henry Ward Beecher delivered the “Pinky sermon,” one of his most famous turns at the pulpit. Beecher was the minister of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. For this particular sermon, he assumed the guise of a slave dealer, but with a twist. Gesticulating wildly, employing the rat-a-tat-tat cadence of an auctioneer, Beecher urged his congregation not to purchase a slave, but rather to buy freedom for one—an actual slave named Sally Diggs, a.k.a. Pinky. The donation basket passed from pew to pew, and more than $900 was raised. The money was used to buy Pinky from her master and set her free.

  But the Southern way of life had no shortage of eloquent defenders. William Yancey, most vociferous of the so-called Fire Eaters, crisscrossed the region, delivering impassioned oratory in support of slavery and states’ rights. “We want negroes cheap,” boomed Yancey, “and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.”

  Once again, some of the most extreme discord occurred in the very halls of Congress, where ideologically opposed Northerners and Southerners met on a daily basis. It was a genuine flash point. Already, there was quite a history of incidents such as the fifty-member melee that broke out on the House floor in 1858 and a particularly ugly episode in 1856 when South Carolina’s Preston Brooks confronted Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the Senate and proceeded to beat him senseless with a cane. Sumner required a year off to recover, and his faculties would never fully return.

  In the early months of 1860, yet another flare-up occurred in Congress. On March 7, Charles Van Wyck of New York was in the midst of delivering a scathing attack on slavery before the House of Representatives. Suddenly, Mississippi’s Reuben Davis rose and cut him off, shouting, “I pronounce the gentleman a liar and a scoundrel. I pronounce the gentleman’s assertion false—utterly false.”

  “My time is short,” said Van Wyck, “and I hope not to be interrupted.”

  “You have no right to utter such foul and false slanders,” continued Davis.

  The situation quickly spun out of control. Davis challenged Van Wyck to a duel, suggesting that they repair to a location outside the District of Columbia, where the practice remained legal.

  “I travel anywhere, and without fear of anyone,” rejoined Van Wyck.

  The duel never happened. But a feeling of menace, more profound than ever before, settled over Congress. Supposedly, many members started carrying weapons into the chambers. “Every man in both houses is armed with a revolver—some with two—and a bowie-knife,” reported Senator James Hammond of South Carolina in a letter of April 19, 1860. This was hyperbole, no doubt. But matters had truly sunk to a frightening new low.

  Against this backdrop, the impending Heenan-Sayers prizefight was followed with avid interest. The match was one of the very few things capable of bridging the divisiveness that gripped America. It promised to be savage, a kind of proxy for all of the country’s simmering hatred and fury and bloodlust. But it had the advantage of being a sporting event, a mere diversion. What’s more, the fight pitted America against Britain, the original enemy.

  While in England, Heenan’s handlers disguised his identity, furnishing eyeglasses and less flamboyant clothing. He remained constantly on the move, training at a variety of undisclosed locations. Secrecy was paramount. On both sides of the Atlantic, vast sums were being wagered on the outcome. No one wanted the big fight disrupted by authorities. Several American papers dispatched reporters to Britain, among them the New York Herald and the Spirit of the Times, a sporting sheet. The reporters gathered whatever tidbits could be learned about Heenan, dutifully relaying them to hungry readers back home.

  News traveled slowly between England and America, however, due to an unfortunate circumstance. A couple of years earlier, in 1858, the transatlantic telegraph line had gone dead after less than a month of spotty operation, and no one had figured out how to revive it. Now, the only communication between England and America was provided by ships and took about a week. Still, the appetite for news—even delayed news—of the fight preparations was quite simply insatiable. “The sporting fraternity talk of nothing else,” stated the Plattsburgh (NY) Republican.

  For Menken, the situation quickly grew excruciating. It wasn’t so much that she was in suspense or worried about her new husband’s prospects; rather, she sensed that a golden opportunity was passing her by. All this delicious hype was building, and here she was, saddled with a secret. Menken could contain herself no longer. She approached a couple of New York columnists and revealed that indeed she was the wife of the famous boxer. This fresh subplot in the Heenan saga was picked up by papers across the country. “Commonplace people and commonplace events are out of fashion,” announced the New-York Illustrated News. “Startling sensations are more the orde
r of the day. That a poetess should marry a prize-fighter seems a contradiction of the laws of ‘affinity’—but such a fact has occurred.” A bemused Whitman referred to Menken as “Mrs. Heenan.”

  The marriage revelation gave her career an instant boost, exactly as she must have calculated. Soon she was performing protean comedies such as Satan in Paris and An Unprotected Female to packed houses. When Menken took curtain calls, audiences chanted her husband’s name. By now, Menken was several months along in her pregnancy. She was probably showing, but the ever-resourceful actress, it seems, relied on wraps and scarves and assorted loose-fitting frippery to hide her condition.

  Presently, the date of the big fight arrived, April 17. A regulation ring, twenty-four by twenty-four feet, had been set up in an open field right outside London. A huge crowd was gathering. In recent days, people had learned the location through a kind of whispering campaign that moved through London’s sporting pubs.

  In one corner stood Heenan, six-foot-two and 195 pounds, wearing a red-white-and-blue belt. In the other stood Sayers, his belt emblazoned with a British gold lion. At five-foot-eight, 149 pounds, Sayers was dwarfed by his American opponent. Weight class was no consideration in illegal boxing, though. Sayers was considered an extraordinarily crafty fighter: patient, elusive, always a threat to deliver punches in surprising and creative combinations. As British champion, he had bested plenty of larger men. He possessed an additional potent weapon: desperation. A bricklayer by trade, Sayers had fallen deep into debt and was trying to support a wife and five children in a London slum. He once allowed that he would fight “an elephant for fifty quid.”

  The match got under way at 7:29 a.m., scheduled for first thing in the morning in the hopes of avoiding detection by London’s metropolitan police. During the early rounds, the two boxers circled warily, squinting in the light of the rising sun. Heenan looked to have the advantage. He landed repeated punches, some knocking Sayers down. Other times, Heenan simply picked the smaller man up and hurled him to the ground, ending the round. As he lay there, Sayers always made a point of smiling broadly. It was unsettling.

  Round 7 was a turning point, setting the tone for the rest of the match. At the opening bell, Heenan bolted from his stool, came barreling out toward Sayers. The American wanted to end this now. Sayers danced around, ducking and weaving. Suddenly, he lashed out and caught Heenan’s left cheek. Heenan’s eyes widened in genuine surprise. Now, it was Sayers who menaced Heenan. The Brit landed repeated blows, working and tearing at the gash on Heenan’s face with his bare knuckles. Relentlessly, Sayers directed punch after punch at this same spot, and Heenan was lulled into a rhythm, using every parry to protect his left cheek. Then, without warning, Sayers landed a punch square on Heenan’s right eye. The eye began to swell shut. Still, Heenan managed to knock Sayers down to end the round. It lasted thirteen minutes, an unusual amount of time for a bare-fisted boxing round.

  Vendors worked the crowd, hawking oranges and ginger beer. Petty thieves circulated, pinching spectators’ pocket watches. A surprisingly large press corps was on hand, scribbling notes. The British accounts would be especially colorful, featuring passages such as “Tom got a hot ’un on the whistler, which shook his ivories, and turned on a fresh tap.” (Translation: Sayers took a punch to the mouth that rattled his teeth and caused him to drool blood.) Even erstwhile Pfaffian Thomas Nast was present, on assignment for the New-York Illustrated News, making lightning-quick sketches of the match.

  It was during round 9 that the first bobbies showed up. There were only two of them, so they simply stood on the periphery, doing nothing. They were woefully outnumbered. The crowd had now swelled into the thousands. It wasn’t composed only of bookies and rowdies and fight aficionados, either. Novelist William Thackeray was on hand, along with assorted professors, clergy, and other pillars of society, some watching the action through monocles. According to a fast-circulating rumor, Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, was present in disguise with orders to convey the results immediately to Queen Victoria.

  As the match crossed the one-hour mark, it started to take on the quality of an endurance contest. Heenan had landed a terrific blow to Sayers’s right arm. The arm had stiffened and became useless as anything but a shield. The Brit’s strategy was clear to everyone present. Heenan’s right eye had swollen shut. With his good arm, Sayers stabbed and jabbed, hoping to connect with Heenan’s good eye. The pair slogged on, passing twenty, then thirty, rounds. Between rounds, the fighters drank hot tea spiked with brandy, trying just to keep going.

  Bobbies kept arriving, and eventually they assembled a critical force. They began to press through the crowd, waving their nightsticks. Inside the ring, bedlam broke out. The referee fled and spectators milled about. Sayers staggered and pitched, grotesquely diminished from his earlier fleet-footed self. Heenan—both eyes now puffy, nearly blind—swung wildly, frequently connecting with innocent bystanders. As the bobbies burst into the ring, the two boxers fell in with the throng, set off running across the field, and managed to evade capture. Heenan was checked into a country inn, where he lay low, quite literally, spending two whole days in a darkened room, recovering.

  According to the “official” tally, the match went an outrageous forty-­two rounds and lasted two hours and twenty minutes. Because it had been broken up by the police, the first-ever world championship bout was declared a draw. Heenan and Sayers split the £400 purse.

  Back in America, people awaited results of the April 17 contest, expected sometime the following week. The Vanderbilt was the first scheduled steamer out of England following the fight—it would be the bearer of news. Predictably, all kinds of shady operators tried to profit on the time lag, claiming inside knowledge of the outcome. A particularly enterprising con artist printed a fake edition of the Spirit of the Times, announcing Heenan the victor of a one-hour bout. The ruse succeeded in bilking some bettors, but most people were sophisticated enough to recognize the edition as fake; it had appeared too soon. On April 28, the Vanderbilt chugged into New York Harbor, and at last the results were known.

  As she read the New York Herald’s vivid, blow-by-blow account of the fight, Menken experienced a rush of mixed emotions. She was thrilled that Heenan had fought so bravely, but disappointed the match had been called a draw. Most of all, she was anxious: the Herald article represented the only news she had received about her husband for some time now. She had written to Heenan repeatedly, in care of his English handlers. But he had stopped sending letters in return.

  Such an odd, conflicted, confounding time, and not just for Menken, but for everyone. An extraordinarily unusual occurrence on July 20, 1860, only added to this feeling.

  The day was sweltering across much of the Eastern Seaboard. Temperatures remained uncomfortably high well into evening. As a consequence, many people remained outside, sat near open windows, or went up on tenement rooftops—just hoping to catch a breeze.

  Those who witnessed the event noted that it began at roughly 9:45 p.m. A kind of orb, shrouded in purplish mist, appeared on the horizon. As it started across the night sky, the orb split into two distinct bodies. The lead one was round and bright as a full moon, the trailing one slightly smaller and dimmer. To witnesses, the two bodies seemed to move very slowly and in perfect unison. One onlooker felt that they traveled “a little faster than the usual speed of a horse.” It was generally agreed that it took a full minute for the twin orbs to traverse the sky, entering at the northwest horizon, exiting to the southeast. Many reported seeing flaming tails or sparks flying off the astral bodies. One witness suggested that they were “like two chariots of fire.”

  What transpired that evening was an earth-grazing meteor procession, caused when a meteor dips down into the atmosphere and breaks apart and the pieces continue along the same trajectory. This is an incredibly rare occurrence. Modern astronomers know of only three other instances: in 1783, 1876, and 1913.

  The 18
60 meteor procession was visible from Boston to Baltimore, seen as far west as Detroit, and was watched by sailors aboard a ship two hundred miles out to sea. It lit up city streets and bathed the countryside in an eerie glow. It was seen by a vast number of Americans—untold thousands—who stared up at the sky with a mix of awe and anxiety.

  The New York Herald described it as a “most sublime spectacle,” adding that “meteors, like comets and eclipses, have been, from the remotest antiquity, regarded as portentous omens.” A headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer asked, “A Forerunner of Ruin?”

  It’s quite possible that Whitman saw the meteor procession, perhaps even while walking along Broadway en route to or from Pfaff’s. He certainly heard and read all about it. Astronomy was one of his myriad interests; he’d attended countless lectures on the subject. Five years in the future—in a very different time, when a great deal had changed—Whitman would publish a poem, “Year of Meteors (1859–60).” In it, he would look back on this period as a “year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings!” Whitman would also make a connection between himself and the strange celestial occurrence of July 20: “As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant, / What am I myself but one of your meteors?”