New York - The Novel

at capacity, fitting warships and ironclads; Brooks Brothers were turning out uniforms by the thousand. And beyond that, wartime governments needed stupendous funds. Wall Street was making a fortune floating government bonds. Even the stock market was booming.
    Hetty ignored his remark, and went on the attack again.
    “Your slave-owning friends are going to lose.”
    Was she right? Probably. Even after the wavering states like Virginia had thrown in their lot with the South, the contest was hopelessly unequal. If you looked at the resources of the two sides, the manpower, industry, even the agricultural production of the North dwarfed that ofthe South. The strategy of the North was simple: blockade the South and throttle her.
    Yet the South was not without hope. Her troops were brave and her generals splendid. Early in the war, at Bull Run, Stonewall Jackson had withstood the Union men and sent them scurrying back to Washington. General Robert Lee was a genius. Furthermore, while the Union troops were fighting to impose their will on their neighbors, the men of the South were fighting, on their own territory, for their heritage. If the South could hold out long enough, then perhaps the North would lose heart and leave them alone. True, Lee had been turned back, with terrible losses, up at Antietam last year, and General Grant had just smashed the Confederates at Gettysburg, but it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long way.
    “The North can win,” Master acknowledged, “but is it worth the price? The Battle of Shiloh was a bloodbath. Tens of thousands of men are being slaughtered. The South is being ruined. And for what?”
    “So that men can live in freedom, as God ordains.”
    “The slaves?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Lincoln thinks slavery is wrong—that I don’t deny—but he went to war to preserve the Union. He made that perfectly clear. He has even said, in public: ‘If I could save the Union without freeing a single slave, I’d do it.’ His words. Not mine.” He paused. “What does Lincoln want for the slaves? Who knows? From what I hear, his main idea for liberated slaves is to find a free colony in Africa or Central America, and send them there. Do you know he actually told a delegation of black men, to their faces, that he doesn’t want Negroes in the United States?”
    Fairly chosen or not, the fact that every one of these statements had some basis served only, as Frank knew it would, to rile Hetty more.
    “That’s not what he means at all!” she cried. “What about the Proclamation?”
    Master smiled. The Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s masterstroke. The abolitionists loved it, of course—just as Lincoln intended that they should. He’d announced it late last year, repeated it this spring. Told all the world that the slaves of the South would be freed.
    Or had he?
    “Have you studied, my dear, what our president actually said?” Frank inquired. “He threatens to emancipate the slaves in any state remaining in rebellion. It’s a negotiating ploy. He’s telling the Confederates: ‘Quit now, because if you delay, I’ll set free all your slaves.’ Yet his Proclamationspecifically exempts every slave county that has already fallen to the Union. God knows how many thousand slaves are now under Lincoln’s control. But of those, he’s not freeing a single one. Not one.” He gazed at her in triumph. “So much for the abolitionists’ hero.”
    “Wait until the war is over,” she countered. “Then you’ll see.”
    “Perhaps.”
    “You only hate him because he has morals.”
    Frank shrugged. “Morals? What morals? He’s got men held without trial in Fort Lafayette. So he evidently cares nothing for habeas corpus. He’s thrown men in jail for writing against him. Seems our lawyer president has never heard of the Zenger trial, either. I’ll tell you what your friend Lincoln is. He’s a cynical tyrant.”
    “Copperhead!”
    A poisonous snake. It was Lincoln’s term, for those who questioned the war effort.
    “If you mean that I think this war might have been avoided,” he said in a voice that was dangerously quiet, “and that I’d like to see a peace negotiated, you are absolutely right. And I’m not alone. You think that makes me evil? Think it.” He paused before suddenly shouting: “But at least I’m not trying to send our son to a pointless death. And I guess you are.” He turned on his heel.
    “That is unfair,” she cried.
    “I’m going