Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  Performances to Commence Precisely at Eight O’clock.

  In Britain, there is wide support for the Confederacy, especially in commercial circles and among the intelligentsia. In Canada as well, to the extent that Jefferson Davis will be greeted as a hero when he visits Toronto almost immediately after getting out of prison once the war is over. Such a show of support for the South is not an endorsement of slavery, which was outlawed in Britain long ago, even longer ago in the Canadas. It is mostly a wish for a humbler and less menacing United States, which has not yet become the world’s most power ful nation but is perceived as the most dangerous. The Empire isn’t pro-slavery, it’s anti-Union.

  The Confederacy has set up a mission in Montreal, and the city instantly becomes a nest of Northern spies, freelances and mercenaries: interesting people. Because Britain does not recognize the Confederate States (no one does), this is not an official embassy but only a commission, run by a commissioner. There is a branch in Toronto and another in Halifax. At first, the primary business of these commissioners is the remote cultivation of the so-called Peace Democrats and Copperheads. But the extent of true antiwar sentiment in the North is difficult to gauge and easy to misinterpret, for the administration is always able to shut the mouths of opponents simply by calling them unpatriotic. In any case, the commissioners operate independently of one another, indeed are answerable to different parts of the Confederate cabinet— War and State. Later that Summer, too much later in fact, they switch to hatching plots: plans to free Southern prisoners by force, plans to strike at Northern civilians as Lincoln had struck at Southern ones, plans to have third parties donate clothing infected with the yellow fever bacillus to Union hospitals.

  The Democratic Party will be convening in Chicago to choose its candidate to run against Lincoln. Camp Douglas, nearby, houses eight thousand Confederate prisoners. What if the eight thousand could be freed, and armed? What if an uprising could be organized in several American cities for the opening day of the convention? The logistics are of course insurmountable and the very logic is wobbly, as many of the poor prisoners are weak from sickness and malnutrition. The conspirators fall to arguing but agree to postpone the plan until the general election in November.

  Having failed to win the support of Britain, the government in Richmond— paradoxically, just like the one in Washington— aspires at least to keep it neutral. Yet it hopes to open a sort of second front, harassing the Union from Canada, a tricky proposition in several ways, given the neutrality laws. Necessity triumphs over caution. Richmond is so desperate that it sends a great deal of money it cannot afford to spend, an enormous sum for the starving nationstate that shrinks every day like a summer pond, to finance its Canadian operations. The people in place there, however, can’t agree on who’s in charge. The commissioner in Toronto, who before the war represented Alabama in the United States Senate, operates from the Queen’s Hotel on the north side of Front Street between Bay and Yonge. He becomes involved in spreading rumors about a proposed peace conference to be held in Niagara Falls. The plan is to lure Lincoln into participating and then expose the event as a sham, thus making the odds against his reelection even longer. The invitation comes when Union losses are particularly appalling, and Lincoln knows he must pretend to be interested. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, acts as intermediary and general busybody. The commissioner sets himself up at the Clifton House, a hotel in Niagara Falls, and grants audiences to all sorts of strange characters from both sides of the border. Nothing happens.

  As all this is playing out, the celebrated actor with the black hair, black moustaches, black piercing eyes and finely tailored black suits of clothes checks into the best hotel in Montreal, the St. Lawrence Hall on St. James Street. The Confederate commissioner lives and works there. Wilkes is counting on the fact that all comings and goings are observed by Union spies.

  The election and the end of the South’s ability to fight are both getting close when the Toronto commissioner has another idea. There are three thousand Southern prisoners on Johnson’s Island, near Sandusky on the Ohio side of Lake Erie, not far from Windsor and Detroit. A Southern spy has ingratiated himself with the crew of the Union gunboat that guards the prison camp. His mission is to disable or scuttle it. His colleagues hijack an American passenger steamer to help spirit the freed prisoners to the safety of Canada. Alas, the Southern spy, the same person charged with carrying out the yellow fever plan, is a double agent, and reports the Confederate plot to the American consul in Toronto. Finding themselves betrayed, the insurgents beach their pirated ship on Canadian soil and seek refuge. The United States demands they be extradited and Canada agrees, but Britain overrules the order.

  Wilkes has been earning as much as thirty thousand a year as an actor. From this he has invested six in the petroleum boom that is sweeping Pennsylvania. Until just a few years ago, the substance was used primarily as a medicine, both human and veterinary. When ways were discovered of extracting it cheaply and then refining it, it was turned into kerosene, making whale-oil lamps a thing of the past. Many fortunes are being made as refineries get built (though within six or seven years all of them will be owned by one man, this young Rockefeller chap in Cleveland). Wilkes, however, actually loses money in oil. He either sells his shares in Dramatic Oil and Pithole Creek at a loss or signs them over to his family and friends, for he is putting his affairs in order.

  Wilkes and many of his friends are Marylanders. Maryland is indeed the perfect location for them to be from, a bizarre world unto itself. There is no other place where people change sides with such alacrity or play both sides against the center with such ease. There is probably no other where the political divisions among members of the same family are starker or more fractious. Maryland has slaves, because Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation applies only to the eleven Confederate states. Now, in October, Maryland’s voters go to the polls to endorse or reject a new state constitution put forward by Lincolnite Republicans that would outlaw slavery there and bring the state into line. The Democrats work hard to defeat it and at first blush appear to have succeeded, albeit by a margin of a mere two thousand votes. For only the second time in American politics, however, absentee citizens are eligible to vote. In this case, the majority of absentee voters are Union soldiers. When their ballots are tallied, the new constitution is upheld by the skinniest of margins. The Democrats cry foul. Lincoln’s enemies add election rigging to their list of his heinous sins.

  The Montreal that Wilkes visits for ten days or more can probably boast the world’s densest concentration of spies, government detectives, informers and double-crossers. Many local businessmen see an incomparable opportunity to cash in on politics. This is especially the case with Montreal shipowners, who have a lucrative business carrying passengers who can enter the United States or set foot on a U.S. vessel only at the greatest possible peril. Canadian vessels can sail down the St. Lawrence and head south for St. George’s in Bermuda or Nassau in the Bahama Islands. There the travelers connect with still other vessels, some of whose owners provide only the simplest documentation and whose loyalties, whenever any must be shown, are tailored snugly to fit the occasion.

  Such men are distinct from actual blockade-runners, usually Americans, loyal either to the Struggle or to money, possibly both, who enter Southern ports by stealth and trickery. Some of their steamers, low and fast, are painted the color of slate. They await a night when the air currents are perfectly in their favor, with banks of fog drifting in and out. They burn especially carbonaceous coal so that a huge plume of black smoke forms above them. Then they close their dampers and allow the fog to carry the black cloud away, hoping Union gunboats will chase the smoke and not the ship, which slips into Charleston, let us say, under cover of poor visibility.

  The work is obviously dangerous, and many of those who practice it are, just as obviously, untrustworthy. One of them, a Baltimore man now operating out of Montreal, is such a questionable fellow that th
e Confederacy keeps just as close a watch on him as its adversaries do. Wilkes befriends him, befriends his family, and entrusts him with his entire theatrical wardrobe— his bread and butter— which he has brought with him, no doubt as part of his cover, and now pays to have shipped back to Maryland by way of Nassau. The two men go to a Montreal bank, where Wilkes opens an account, trades gold for pound sterling, which he gives the man in payment for his service, and gets a draft for four hundred and fifty-five dollars, which he then takes back to the States himself.

  While this is going on, the Montreal commissioner launches another scheme to disrupt the Union. He assembles a band of raiders, former prisoners of war who had escaped to Canada, to recross the border into Vermont and rob banks and set fires in the town of St. Albans. This time the Union feels the pain and reacts with boiling anger. The raiders make their way back to Canada but are pursued by U.S. authorities, who arrest fourteen of them on Canadian soil, where of course they have no authority to do so. An international incident ensues. The United States surrenders the men, grumpily, to Canadian officials, who try them for violating the neutrality laws. They are found not guilty on the grounds that they are foreign soldiers at war. Only the leader is treated more severely, but he is saved from the gallows by the brilliant legal work of John J.C. Abbott, a professor of law at McGill in Montreal. Thus propelled into public life, Abbott later becomes prime minister of Canada. By this time Wilkes, back in Washington, finds, at a livery stable, another conspirator, Davy Herold, a twenty-two-year-old pharmacist’s assistant who, though quite a bit brighter than Atzerodt, is nonetheless distinguished by his lack of mental vitality.

  A Confederate lieutenant and a group of his men set out to snatch the governor of Maryland but scrap the plot at the eleventh hour; as they flee southward, the mastermind is killed by locals during a robbery. Such kidnapping schemes are not uncommon, and some talk goes far beyond mere abduction. The newspapers in Richmond speculate openly about how Lincoln might be assassinated. General Lee keeps vetoing the crazy schemes that people put to him. Meanwhile, Wilkes continues to make a point of being seen with people he knows are being closely observed, so that word of his movements will be noted in reports sent to Washington. In this way he reinforces the supposition that he has Confederate credentials. But in a world of double agents and others who are not always (perhaps “not often”) what they appear to be, he comes to the attention of Richmond as well. Wilkes is famous and he certainly looks as though he is well funded, and so Lewis Powell is sent to insinuate himself into the conspiracy, or whatever it is.

  Powell, who now calls himself Lewis Payne (or sometimes Paine), is a professional, trained to be clever, and his cleverness, like other people’s, is often ruthless. He has been a soldier and was wounded at Gettysburg. He has been a prisoner of war. He can talk his way out of most messes and fight his way out of the others. His best trick was the time he escaped custody after getting a prison nurse to fall in love with him. He knows how to do such things. He knows equally well how to kill someone by quietly wringing his neck as he would a chicken’s.

  The raid across the Canadian border into Vermont is the only Confederate operation planned in Canada that has come close to succeeding. Wilkes has low regard for the Southern operatives up in Montreal but knows that giving voice to such a view is dangerous to one’s congeniality. The commissioners, after all, are representatives of his country’s government, a legitimate constitutional authority born of necessity. People will be more likely to join him in his mission if they believe that Richmond is winking at him approvingly or even paying him for his efforts.

  Wilkes’s sister Asia and her husband have moved to Philadelphia. He stops by on his way back to the District after one of his mysterious visits to New York and carries on predictably. He paces as he fumes, perhaps the natural extension of his violent emotion, perhaps the residue of his long training on the stage. He tells his sister that Lincoln is no less tyrannical than Napoleon and “is overturning the republic and making himself king”: a common theme of his talk. He sputters on about how Lincoln, the simple country lawyer and man of the people, accepted a fortune as his fee for getting the Illinois Central Rail Road out of paying its taxes.

  Asia knows that her brother becomes angry when he is depressed, and she is glad that he feels he can purge himself of fury in her calming presence. She believes that this is how she can be of value to him, and hopes he is saving his rage for when he can calumniate in her front parlor, banging into the furniture, going wherever emotion takes him, not tossing it about recklessly in public. Secretly, for he is a man of secrets, he feels the same way, but cannot always prevent certain surges of impulse from overpowering him. Because of the difference in gender, and also despite it, they share a bond he does not enjoy with his other siblings, a couple of whom, particularly Edwin, he has come to despise.

  That he is not in Edwin’s presence on the day of the national election is undoubtedly for the best, for that is when the well-nigh impossible comes to pass. When Grant unclogs the Mississippi and then moves east, the Confederacy finds itself truly surrounded. But then Grant gets bogged down in the long siege of Petersburg, near Richmond, just as the butcher General William Tecumseh Sherman is himself brought to a halt outside Atlanta. Voters in the North know of course that the South is losing day by day, though they are more concerned with the fact that the North is not exactly winning, as enormous armies sit on their haunches, conspicuously stalemated. The Democrat, George McClellan, who has war credentials and, to many, including himself, the status of a neglected hero, is anticipating a new life in the Executive Mansion. But then, in September, Sherman breaks through to the center and soul of Atlanta. This is the city where all the railroads converge, pumping blood into a Confederacy that is still alive somehow, miraculously so, however limited its time on Earth. He destroys the city more thoroughly than any city has ever been destroyed before. He does so just in time for Lincoln to nab fifty-five percent of the popular vote, the first president since Andrew Jackson to win a second term: the greatest last-minute comeback in the history (and perhaps the future) of American politics. As in all such miracles, the winner’s enemies charge fraud. This time eleven of the thirty-five states allow absent citizens to exercise the franchise, and the troops in blue cast their votes for the boss. Wherever he is when he reads the results, Wilkes gasps with barely suppressed violence until green and yellow bile seems to run from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, dripping onto the costly carpets.

  Maryland. What a place. The Baltimore oriole is the state bird, the white oak is the state tree, and Wilkes’s distemper is the state personality. It is a place that takes politics personally. In one obviously Democratic county, the only known Republican has been lynched. Curiously, this does not deter Republicans from multiplying exponentially. In the southern reaches of the state, rivers are outlined by swamps and low-hanging vegetation. Virginia is just a spit away. A paradise for smugglers, political as well as commercial, despite the efforts of one Lafayette Baker, a self-inflated runner of spies who has slowly taken control of the Union secret service from Allan Pinkerton and is vowing to root out the evil-doers from whatever swamps they have hidden in.

  Pretending to be interested in investing in local real estate, the perfect cover for all otherwise unacceptable forms of curiosity, Wilkes goes down to the riverine boundary with Virginia, then to Philadelphia once again, where he entrusts Asia with a sealed packet of documents, watching her as she locks it in her husband’s iron safe. Wilkes is not fond of his brother-in-law, largely for the same reason he is also not fond of Edwin: they are Union men. Another brother, Joseph, is of the opposite inclination. As for Junius, the eldest, named after their late and sainted father the famous tragedian, no one is sure, not even Junius himself. Their mother is frightened of the discord, which is making her ill. The children and in-laws must avoid discussing the news or politics when she is present. All the more remarkable then that Wilkes and Edwin, who oftentimes have diffic
ulty speaking to each other in private, agree to do so onstage. There will be a performance of Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden on Broadway in New York, a benefit to raise money for a bronze bust of Shakespeare to be installed in Central Park. Wilkes, clean-shaven for the occasion, portrays Marc Antony. Edwin plays Brutus. In retrospect, it should have been the other way round. Mother sits in the audience. At one point incipient panic runs through the house on the rumor that the theater is on fire. In fact, it is the hotel next door that is the target of arsonists. It is one of a dozen structures, including P.T. Barnum’s museum of freaks and curiosities, that Confederate agents from Canada have tried to set ablaze. To that end they have employed Greek fire that a local chemist has concocted for them using phosphorous and paint thinner. He has, however, cheated them by utilizing inferior materials and pocketing the difference in price to maximize his profit. Wilkes is disgusted when he learns of the bungled exercise in official pyromania. He wonders whether he is the only competent person other than General Lee trying to bring the United States government to its knees.

  He feels pretty good about bringing people like Dave Herold into the kidnapping plot. He makes bold enough while on another visit to New York, and again a little while later, to approach a former acting colleague, Sam Chester, first talking in loaded generalities, then subtle hints, finally in veiled blatancies. Chester is used to reading texts for their concealed meanings and deflects the silent demands for a response. When Wilkes continues to feel him out at other meetings obviously contrived for this purpose, Chester finally expresses his horror at what his friend is suggesting. Wilkes reacts as though he has been wounded in battle. He has to be careful, more careful now than ever, more careful every day, yet he finds he can work things out only by resort to pencil and paper.

  “There will be many in this enterprise,” he writes in a memorandum to himself. “In the end I am unsure what the number will be. Dozens will be necessary, even scores, I have no doubt. I shall recruit as the need arises and opportunity allows, but I must not lose sight of the fact that this is a conspiracy of one, by myself, and therein the danger, for there is none who can measure a mind-storm such as that which has caused me to assume incorrectly that my old acquaintance of the boards has the intellect to see the solution to the problems that command the urgent attention of us all.”