The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  Train had been sympathetic toward the miners. And they, in turn, admired him. They felt kinship toward an individualist who came from a nation that had once upended British authority. They proffered him the presidency of their projected Five Star Republic. Train declined. “I neither wanted it, nor could I have obtained it,” he remarked years after.

  Train was in his office one morning, working at his desk, when the fugitive McGill slipped into the room, locked the door, and stood before him. “I hear that you have some eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Colt’s revolvers in stock,” McGill began. “I have been sent down here to get them.”

  Train stared at him. “Do you know that there is a reward for your head of one thousand pounds?”

  “That does not mean anything.”

  Train became angry. “This will not do. You have no right to compromise me in this way.”

  “We have elected you president of our republic.”

  “Damn the republic … I am not here to lead or encourage revolutions, but to carry on my business.”

  In that tense moment, there was a knock on the door. It was the Melbourne Chief of Police. Hastily, Train hid McGill, admitted the Chief, learned that he merely wanted to requisition some Concord wagons. Train got rid of him, then returned to the fugitive. “Now, McGill, I am not going to betray you, but am going to save your life. You must do as I tell you.”

  Train found a barber and had him shave off McGill’s mustache and cut his hair. Then Train had McGill change into laborers’ clothes. In this guise McGill was led to the safety of one of Train’s clippers, where he was put to work as a stevedore. Three days later he was safe at sea and with him went Train’s prospects for the Australian presidency.

  Actually, Train had more ambitious plans. He felt that his Australian commission business was too limited and that the New Englanders he dealt with were too conservative. He decided to pull up roots and move north. A year before, Commodore Matthew Perry and his seven black ships had sailed into Yedo Bay and opened Japan to world trade. Train set his sights on a new business in Yokohama.

  Though he started out for Japan, he never quite reached it. When he arrived in Shanghai, he learned that all sailings for Yokohama had been canceled and would not be resumed until the Crimean War peace treaty had been settled. But neither the journey toward Japan nor the long voyage home after was wasted. The sights Train saw and the adventures he met stimulated a lifelong odyssey that took him four times around the world and across the Atlantic on twenty-seven different occasions.

  From the moment Train left Australia he peppered the pages of the New York Herald with a provocative running commentary on his travels. Sailing through the Strait of Sunda, he saw the volcanic island of Krakatau threaten eruption. And erupt it finally did, exactly twenty-eight years later, in the loudest blast in all history (heard as far away as Australia), an explosion that sent waves halfway around the earth to the English Channel. He halted in Singapore to visit a Chinese millionaire and his two pet tigers, rode from Hong Kong to Canton with H. E. Green, the future husband of

  Hetty Green, and strolled about Manchu-ruled Shanghai shuddering at the “gory heads of rebels hanging from the walls.”

  Continuing his travels, he visited the Black Hole of Calcutta and felt that “there have been many worse catastrophes.” He approved of the cremation pyres on the Ganges because they were economical, costing only one-half cent per body. He found nine flying fish dead in his berth near Aden. He took a donkey to the Pyramids. He was shocked by Palestine. “For three days I saw nothing but humbug and tinsel, lying and cheating, ugly women, sand-fleas and dogs.” He was revolted by Bethlehem, “disgusted at being taken down two flights and shown an old wet cave as the place where the Saviour was said to have been born.” He visited Balaklava in the Crimea and reported that the Charge of the Light Brigade had been “a terribly exaggerated affair, so far as massacre was concerned.”

  When he returned to New York in July 1856, the Herald greeted him with sixteen full columns of his letters from abroad and James Gordon Bennett met him with the request that he run for Congress. But the wanderlust was, for the moment, more important to him than politics.

  In 1856 he returned to Europe with his wife and infant daughter, taking up residence in Paris at the Grand-Hotel du Louvre, in the rue de Rivoli. He contracted to write a series of financial articles for Merchants’ Magazine and determined to become a linguist like the German businessmen he had met in the East. He already knew German. Now he hired a Catholic priest to tutor him in French and Italian. When he wasn’t studying he was trying to enter European society. He mingled with French counts, Spanish dukes, and tsarist princes, and felt what he learned from them “made up for the loss of a college career.” He was childishly happy to be invited to a formal ball given by Napoleon III in the Tuileries. There were four thousand guests, many waltzing to an orchestra led personally by Johann Strauss. Train was pleased to meet the Emperor’s current mistress and to speak to the Empress Eugénie in French.

  He did not remain in Paris long. He went to Rome, where a fiery Italian delegation welcomed him as a liberator. He was certain they mistook him for Garibaldi, but it turned out that they knew who he was. Nevertheless, he wanted no part of their violence. “The curious thing about the affair,” he reflected later, “was that here, as everywhere, these people regarded me as a leader of revolts Carbonari, La Commune, Chartists, Fenians, Internationals as if I were ready for every species of deviltry. For fifteen years, five or six governments kept their spies shadowing me in Europe and America.”

  In 1857 he went to Russia armed with a social message from a mutual friend to the Tsar’s younger brother, the Grand Duke Constantine. Train tracked the Grand Duke to his country residence in Strelna, near St. Petersburg. After that he was royally treated. He found Moscow the most impressive city he had ever seen. “There is something primitive and prehistoric about it. … I was astonished to find in the Kremlin a portrait of Napoleon at the battle of Borodino.”

  But Train was more than a tourist. In every country he carefully made business contacts. It was after his return to Paris from Moscow that one of these contacts paid off handsomely. And soon Train was embroiled in the first of several financial jugglings that were to make him a millionaire.

  He had met Queen Maria Cristina of Spain, one of the wealthiest women in the world. He had also met her financial adviser, Don Jose de Salamanca, the Spanish banking giant. Train swiftly made use of these acquaintances. He learned that when the United States had bought Florida from Spain, part of the purchase money had been deposited to the Queen’s credit in the Bank of the United States. After the bank was liquidated, the Queen’s cash assets were invested in forty thousand acres of Pennsylvania real estate, land rich in coal and iron ore.

  It troubled Train that these forty thousand acres were lying unexplored. He had long had an idea that a rail link should be constructed between the Erie Railroad and the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, thus uniting the East and the Midwest. Now he saw that this link could be built across the Queen’s property in Pennsylvania, enriching her holdings a hundredfold. He approached her, and she was interested. It was all the encouragement Train required.

  He darted in and out of Paris, London, New York, and Pennsylvania, trying to pull the deal together. He needed solid financing. He tried to see the Queen’s banker, Don Jose de Salamanca. He had no luck until he offered to lend him a million dollars. Salamanca’s interest was piqued. But, instead of lending the Spaniard a million, Train walked out with Salamanca’s signature on notes for a million. With this money pledged, Train wangled $2,200,000 worth of credit from manufacturers of iron in Wales. With the financing completed, Train permitted the Queen’s representative in London, James McHenry, who had made a fortune exporting dairy products from America, to take over and push the project to completion.

  Train collected $100,000 in commissions. The four hundred miles of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad were built across three
states, including the Queen’s acres. The railroad proved a terrible failure. It went into receivership three times in thirteen years before it finally became a success as part of the Erie Railroad. In the end, the Queen saw no profits. And the invincible Don Jose de Salamanca had nothing to show for his gamble beyond a sea of red ink and a town named Salamanca in New York.

  Train, however, was heady with his coup and certain that he could make more money by concentrating on transportation. Impressed by horse-drawn streetcars in Philadelphia and New York, he decided to promote them, with a few innovations of his own, in Europe. England, especially, seemed a likely place. Train had long been appalled by the snail’s pace of its carriage traffic. Further, he felt that English labor sorely needed a cheap means of public transportation.

  He took his radical ideas to Liverpool. They were promptly rejected by the authorities, who felt that his trams would clutter the thoroughfares and provide unfair competition for the omnibuses. He moved on to neighboring Birkenhead, and there found that an old shipbuilding friend was chairman of the city commissioners. By promising many concessions among them that he would rip up his tracks and repair the streets at his own expense if the system proved a nuisance Train was given permission to proceed with a “horse tramway.” He laid four miles of tracks, provided spacious streetcars, each drawn by horses, and inaugurated the line on August 30, 1860. The tramway was an immediate sensation.

  Certain that he had overcome all opposition, Train stormed into London. But there he ran into a stone wall. The omnibus people, fearing competition, and the gentry, objecting to overcrowded passages, vigorously opposed him. Train fought the harder, and finally by his eloquence gained permission for an experimental two-mile track from Hyde Park to Bayswater.

  Though the omnibus drivers tried to sabotage him by wrecking his rails with their vehicles, and though the gentry had him jailed once for creating a nuisance, Train might have succeeded but for an unfortunate accident. One day a small boy was run down by a tram. The uproar was tremendous. Train was arrested for manslaughter. Though he was acquitted, the bill authorizing extension of his streetcar lines was voted down in Parliament.

  Undeterred, Train continued to promote his street railways. Glasgow and Birmingham rejected them; Staffordshire allowed him to construct seven miles of track. Gradually, Train broke down resistance, and eventually, he saw his streetcars spread throughout Great Britain and then to Copenhagen, Geneva, and Bombay.

  Train’s battle for cheap transportation in England was a minor skirmish compared with another battle he fought, against the British upper classes on behalf of the Union cause in the Civil War. It was the eve of Fort Sumter. English nobility, distrusting the North’s radical democracy, feeling kinship for the South’s culture, allied itself with English industrialists, who needed Southern cotton, in backing the Confederacy. Only the inarticulate British masses, who sensed that Lincoln’s ideals were their own, sided with the Union.

  If the British people were inarticulate, George Francis Train was not. He appointed himself their spokesman. He took to the public platform, wrote pamphlets, and published a newspaper in an effort to keep England from going into the Civil War on the side of the South.

  His speechmaking was shrewd. He realized that many British laborers could not afford to hear him and that many white-collar workers would not want to hear him, so he offered to speak gratis on behalf of local charities. Into his appearances he injected the atmosphere of a revival meeting; Often he led off by singing “De Camptown Races,” then invited the audience to join him in the chorus. It was fun. And what followed was often fun, too. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Train told listeners: “We invented railways and Mississippi steamboats. We have invented a new kind of war, fighting without killing anybody forty hours of bombardment and no bloodshed.”

  Because the Union had no voice in the London press, Train financed his own propaganda sheet, the London American, published at 100 Fleet Street in a building decorated with the Stars and Stripes. The paper, which Train claimed had received a $100 contribution from Secretary of State Seward, frankly expounded the Northern cause and reprinted all of its publisher’s speeches.

  Two incidents early in the war transformed Train’s campaign from one of wit to one of intemperate bombast, and dangerously imperiled his person. The first was the reporting of the first Battle of Bull Run by the austere London Times. The second was the outcry of the entire English press against the boarding of the British mail-steamer Trent by Union Navy men.

  The Times had sent its renowned correspondent, William H. Russell, a veteran of the Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny, on a tour of the United States. Russell reported that most Americans, influenced by Irish immigrants, disliked England. He made sly innuendoes about certain American democratic institutions such as the “street-railway-car.” He met Lincoln and found himself “agreeably impressed with his shrewdness, humor, and natural sagacity,” but doubted that he was a gentleman. All of this alarmed Train, but did not ruffle his sense of humor. As he remarked from one rostrum: “I can tell you, gentlemen, it is a notorious fact when The Times takes snuff all England sneezes.”

  Then came Bull Run. The citizenry of the North was demanding action. Union troops, in great number, were prematurely sent marching on Richmond. Between Washington and Richmond were four rivers and many streams. One of these streams, thirty miles west of Washington, was called Bull Run. There the outnumbered Confederate soldiery engaged the advancing Army of the Potomac in the first major clash of the war.

  From Washington spectators in wagons, ladies in carriages, and politicians on horseback hurried to a nearby hill to watch the progress of the battle. Among these spectators was Russell. As the day wore on, military wagons approached the spectators. Then came Union soldiers fleeing in great disorder and confusion, insisting that they were being pursued by Confederate cavalry. “I spoke to the men,” Russell wrote, “and asked them over and over again not to be in such a hurry. ‘There’s no enemy to pursue you. All the cavalry in the world could not get at you.’ But I might as well have talked to stones.” Russell reported that when he challenged the cowardice of one Union soldier, the man tried to shoot him, but his pistol jammed. Two days later, in Washington, Russell continued to watch the retreat, “the jaded, dispirited, broken remnants of regiments passing onward, where and for what I knew not.”

  To Train, reading these accounts in London, Russell seemed to be viciously slanting his news blaming the defeat at Bull Run on Northern inability and fear rather than on inexperience. At once Train struck out at The Times correspondent in print and on the lecture platform. He labeled the correspondent “Munchausen Russell” and “The English Libeler.” He accused Russell of being a drunk and a liar. He attacked Russell for presenting “an eye-witness picture of a battle that he not only never saw, but was not within some miles of.” He attacked him as a poor reporter who worked in a fog of intoxication. “Under the impulse of champagne and good brandy, he can paint a battle scene; but how shallow, aside from this, how feeble, his correspondence generally appears.” Actually, Train was unfair. Russell, if perhaps prejudiced, was an honest reporter. He did see a portion of the Battle of Bull Run. And though he did drink, his consumption was considerably less than that of Grant. Nevertheless, Train’s attack on Russell was effective in helping counteract British anti-Union propaganda.

  The Trent affair was another matter. It created universal resentment in England and gave Train much difficulty in his defense of the Union position. In 1861 the Union screw-sloop San Jacinto, commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, intercepted the British steamer Trent 240 miles off Havana. In a violation of international law, of the kind of which the English themselves had been guilty in 1812, American seamen boarded the Trent, searched it for Confederate messages and mail, then removed by force four Southern passengers. The passengers thus abducted were John Slidell and James Mason, Confederate commissioners to France and Great Britain, and their secretaries.

  The Engl
ish press cried insult and shouted for war. Train made speech after speech defending the Union position, but was constantly heckled. Nevertheless, he continued with his argument: “Let us have the evidence that Wilkes has broken the law. England might have the right of asylum, but if they went to war it would be a lunatic asylum.” As time progressed, Train softened his defense. At last he admitted that Slidell and Mason should be given up and indeed, five days later, Seward did surrender them, without apology, but with congratulations to England for “at last adopting the principles of international law for which the United States had long contended.”

  Perhaps Train’s most practical service to the Union cause was in what he termed “my exposure of blockade running from British ports.” In a stream of letters to the New York Herald Train revealed “the names of the men interested, the marks of the cargoes, and the destination of the shipments.” This created intense feeling against Train, who, while he would not carry a gun, admitted that he carried a cane for use as a weapon.

  Before this feeling against him could lead to violence, Train suddenly decided to return home. He had conceived a plan whereby he would end the Civil War. At least a dozen other individuals, mostly Peace Democrats, had tried and failed. But Train, as a relative by marriage to Jefferson Davis, felt that his presence and eloquence in Richmond would be enough. The only obstacle was in reaching the Confederacy. This obstacle, he felt, he could overcome when he received information that a ship named the Mavrockadatis, scheduled to sail from England to Newfoundland, was actually a blockade-runner heading for a Southern port. Train secured passage under the pseudonym of Oliver and was surprised when the ship actually went to Newfoundland.

  In Boston once more, Train was greeted enthusiastically by the press, by hostesses, by organizations wishing him to speak. He took it all quite seriously. “I found that I had returned to my country the most popular American in public life,” he recorded. He made several hasty, ill-conceived speeches. In one, after being presented by the Mayor of Boston, he implored his fellow Americans to ignore English culture. “Let us think for ourselves for we are a superior race.” In another address, after branding the English cowards, he announced that Lord Palmerston had murdered Prince Albert by feeding him draughts of poison, to satisfy his own ambitions. Most persons enjoyed the sensation of his remarks, but a few were sharply critical. The Cleveland Leader, while crediting him for helping his nation in the Trent affair, admitted: “Since his return to this country he has given daily recurring proofs of his total absence of both decency and common sense. He is afflicted with diarrhea of words more than any person we have ever known.”