New York - The Novel

the Supreme Court gave the South an unexpected present. In its Dred Scott decision, the court announced that Congress hadn’t the right to bar slavery from any territory, and that the Founding Fathers had never intended that black men should be citizens in the first place. Even Frank was shaken. Hetty was outraged.
    Finally, to add fuel to the fire, John Brown had raided the armory at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, in the foolish hope of starting a slave uprising. The thing was doomed to failure from the start, and Brown had been hanged by the State of Virginia. But in no time Hetty had informed Frank: “John Brown was a hero.”
    “He was not a hero,” Frank had protested. “He was a madman. His attack at Harper’s Ferry was completely hare-brained. You also seem to forget that he and his sons had already murdered five men in cold blood, just for being pro-slavery.”
    “You just say that.”
    “Because it’s true.”
    As 1860 began, relations between North and South had never been worse. And there was one other factor that, in Frank’s estimation, made the situation even more unstable.
    Frank Master had lived long enough to realize that the great transatlantic economic system, like the weather, had great cycles of its own. From boom to bust, it went round in a circle, always finishing up bigger than it had before, but subject to crisis every few years, and with each crisis, merchants were destroyed, but if one was prudent, the bust could be as profitable as the boom.
    For a while now, the transatlantic system had been going through stormy economic weather. But not everyone had suffered—his own business had even managed to prosper. The people who had been entirely unaffected, however, were the big Southern planters. Boom or bust, the world seemed to need more and more cotton. The big planters had never done better.
    “Cotton is king,” they could say triumphantly. And so confident werethey in the good fortune of the South that some voices could even be heard declaring: “If the Yankees elect a Republican to ruin us, then to hell with the Union. Let the South go it alone.”
    Few in the North took it seriously, of course. “Those Southern braggarts are absurd,” Hetty remarked contemptuously. But Frank was not so sure.
    The coming presidential election, in his opinion, could be a dangerous business. Whatever the
Chicago Tribune
might say, he thought it unlikely that Lincoln would be the Republican candidate. Others surely had stronger claims. But he was quite curious, nonetheless, to take a look at this Lincoln fellow, and see what he was like.

    The huge, dark red mass of the Cooper Institute occupied a triangular site between Third Avenue and Astor Place. Frank had always admired its founder, Peter Cooper, a self-taught industrialist who’d built America’s first railroad steam engine before founding this splendid college to provide free night classes for working men and day classes for women. The most impressive part of the place, in Frank’s opinion, was the Great Hall. It was only last year that he’d come there for the Cooper Institute’s official opening, but already the Great Hall had become one of the most popular places for holding meetings in the city.
    They arrived in good time, and it was as well that they did, for the hall was rapidly filling. Glancing about, Frank made a quick estimate, and remarked to Hetty: “Your man can certainly draw a crowd. There’ll be fifteen hundred people here tonight.”
    The minutes passed, and Hetty seemed quite happy to look around at the crowd. Here and there she saw people she knew. Frank contented himself with calling to mind as many items as he could from the reports of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. After a while, he could not resist bringing up one of them.
    “Your Mr. Lincoln believes in freedom and equality for the black man, doesn’t he, Hetty?”
    “He certainly does.”
    “Yet in the Illinois debates, I distinctly remember, he said that on no account would he give the black man the vote or allow him to serve on a jury. What do you think of that?”
    Hetty looked at him steadily. “I think that’s very simple, dear. If he said anything else, he could never get elected.”
    Frank was just about to point out that she seemed happy to make moral compromises if it suited her, when a movement at the side of the stage signaled that the proceedings were about to begin.
    The gentleman who introduced the speaker did not take long about his