New York - The Novel

there, or maybe he just couldn’t stand the boredom any more—he’d been down there three days. Whatever the reason, young Hudson River sneaked outside. Must havewandered round Battery Park and started up the West Side. That’s where they caught him. They were catching a lot of black men that day. Strung him up on that tree and set fire to him.”
    Horace Slim said nothing, and moved on.
    “That’s a strange one,” he remarked by another photograph. “What is it?”
    “An experiment, technically,” Theodore said. “I was with General Grant’s army at the time. The camera is looking through a magnifying lens that has been placed in front of the object, and you can actually see the magnified image of the object.”
    “I see. But what is it?”
    “It’s a lead slug. A bullet. But I have cut the slug open, so that you can see its internal construction better. You’ll notice that instead of being of a consistency throughout, the slug has a cavity at its base. Invention of a Frenchman named Minié originally—that’s why they call it a Minié ball. As you’ll know, the old smooth-bore musket was never accurate except at short range. But the rifle, with its spiral grooves inside the barrel, causes the bullet to spin, so that it becomes far more deadly over longer ranges.”
    “And the cavity in the slug?”
    “Under the pressure of firing, the open bottom of the slug expands outward, pushes it against the walls of the barrel so that it takes the rifling. That little cavity has brought death to thousands.”
    “Ingenious. The photograph, I mean.” He moved on. “And this pair of broken-down shoes?”
    “General Grant himself showed them to me—in disgust. They came from New York, too. You’d think they were years old, to disintegrate like that, but they’re not a week old.”
    “I see. Shoddy goods.”
    It had been one of the greatest scandals of the war. Profiteers, not a few of them from New York, had got contracts to supply the army and sent them shoddy goods—uniforms that fell apart and, worst of all, boots that seemed to be made of leather, but whose soles were actually compressed cardboard. At the first shower of rain they disintegrated.
    “This may interest you,” Theodore remarked, leading the journalist across to another picture, which consisted of two posters. “I picked ’em up, in different locations, then put them side by side on a wall.” Each advertised the rates being offered for joining the Union army. “You’ll recall the reluctance of our own state to accept any black men into thearmy at all. But, of course, the black regiments came to be some of the best in the Union by the end of the war.”
    The posters were quite straightforward. A white private was offered $13 a month, and a $3.50 clothing allowance. The black private was offered $10 and $3 for clothing.
    “And what point are you making?” the journalist asked. “Are you aiming to shock?”
    “No,” said Theodore, “it’s just a little irony. A reminder, if you like. I dare say plenty of white soldier boys reckoned that difference was fair—after all, the white man’s family would need more, because they lived better.”
    “Not everybody’s going to like you,” said Slim.
    “I know. That’s why my good friends told me not to show this part of the work. But I told ’em—in a friendly way of course—to go to hell. The record is the record, Mr. Slim. It is for you, as a journalist. And it is for me. If we don’t tell the truth as we see it, we have nothing.” He smiled. “Let me show you a landscape.”
    It was the only landscape in the Civil War section—actually three landscapes pasted together to make a wide panorama. And under it, the title:
Marching Through Georgia
.
    “In the fall of ’64, I’d gone back to New York. Grant was stuck in Virginia at that time, and the war so unpopular again that most people reckoned Lincoln would lose the election that year, and the Democrats would make peace with the South so the Confederates could have pretty much declared a victory. But then Sherman took Atlanta, and everything changed. The Union cause was up again, Lincoln would be re-elected, and Sherman would make his great march from Atlanta to the sea. A fine photographer I knew, named George Barnard, went down to join General Sherman there, and I went with him. That’s how this picture came to be taken.”
    “Marching Through Georgia,”
Horace Slim remarked. “Fine song.”
    “Yes. You know