Lawless (22 page)

The driver wore a plug hat and duster. A cigar jutted from his mouth. A trail of smoke faded away behind him. Slowly his face took on definition.

The man was in his late forties, with a graying chestnut beard and mustache, and a wart on his right cheek that became visible at closer range. His shoulders were slightly stooped, a trait of those who’d spent a great deal of time on horseback.

Jephtha had met the man at a small reception given last June by one of the wealthier summer residents, the Philadelphia newspaper publisher George Childs. Jephtha had found the guest of honor a painfully shy man, and was somewhat surprised now when the man lifted his plug hat to acknowledge that he recognized Jephtha.

The trap went racing on up the beach, hidden by the veranda. Coming as it did on top of the pain, the sudden appearance of President Ulysses S. Grant put Jephtha Kent in an exceedingly bad mood.

President Grant had chosen Long Branch as his family’s summer retreat. The sight or the thought of him usually depressed Jephtha. Of course he was somewhat ashamed of the reaction, but there was good reason for it.

Theo Payne was the alcoholic editor-in-chief of the New York
Union,
the daily paper that was now back in the family along with Kent and Son, Boston, and Payne said Grant was unquestionably lost in the labyrinths of Washington politics.

“He’s an honest man and expects others to be honest, which is part of his trouble. He’s constitutionally unable to distinguish between true friends and favor seekers who just flatter him. He’s the wrong man for the hour. We need a chief executive who’s a schemer—or at least can recognize one—because scheming’s the style down by the Potomac. Do you know what the cynics call the capital now? The auction room. Every man or woman with his or her price. Every one of them peddling something. Votes, influence, contracts, honor, physical favors—and the whole country’s starting to get into the same spirit.”

Jephtha trudged around to the veranda. The slight effort tired him, which was both unusual and annoying. He picked up a book from a chair where he intended to do some reading later. He sat down with a loud sigh. It depressed him that he had so little faith in the current administration, since it had come into office on an almost unprecedented floodtide of optimism.

Grant’s campaign slogan had been “Let us have peace.” People had expected him to end Republican factionalism and the political torment generated by the programs and personality of Andrew Johnson. People had expected him to set new, higher standards of morality in government. People had expected him to run a vigorous, effective administration because his war record proved he knew how to choose able lieutenants and put them to work. Grant would do this. Grant would do that. Grant would do everything and do it superbly.

We Americans do have an unfortunate talent for expecting our chief executives to be kin to the Almighty,
he thought.
I’m as guilty as the next that way.

And like millions of others, he had been cruelly disappointed by Grant’s performance to date.

No one doubted the personal integrity of the Union’s greatest hero. But Grant’s judgment was in question only weeks after his election. He’d packed his cabinet with cronies and incompetent party hacks. Theo Payne maintained there were only two first-class men in major administration posts: Jake Cox of Ohio, who headed the Interior Department, and Hamilton Fish of New York, the Secretary of State.

Last autumn the President’s judgment had become even more suspect. Jay Gould, a man who had entertained the President socially, had nearly cornered the United States gold market with the connivance of Grant’s own brother-in-law, a lobbyist named Abel Corbin. At the last moment the President had been alerted to the scheme and had ordered Treasury Secretary Boutwell to sell government gold to break Gould’s corner. But the national consciousness still held the memory of Black Friday, when the price of gold plummeted and speculators who’d followed Gould’s lead were wiped out. Grant had not been shrewd enough to detect the plot on his own.

Lately it seemed to Jephtha that Theo Payne’s remark about the auction room was right. It seemed to him that a trend toward dishonesty was accelerating—and rapidly—everywhere from legislative chambers to private boardrooms. But what supposedly concerned the President most? According to Payne and his equally sarcastic colleagues, two things: keeping French cuisine off the White House table and people who told off-color stories out of his presence. Lincoln’s fondness for outhouse humor had been an all but unbearable cross for General Grant.

Now, as President, he still knew a great deal about blooded horses, purebred bulldogs and quality cigars. He seemed to know little or nothing about how to control spoilsmen, especially those in his own Republican party.

Of course corruption wasn’t confined to the Republicans. Anyone who lived under the control of the Tammany Democrats and their grand sachem, William March Tweed, knew that. For years, New York City and New York County had been bonanzas of boodle. The common council to which Tweed had first been elected had been jocularly referred to as the Forty Thieves. And that was in 1851.

Under the genial Boss Tweed political swindling had been refined to an art, made possible because of the immense power Tweed had acquired. He dominated Democratic politics not only in the county but in the state. His handpicked men occupied the governor’s mansion and the chair of the speaker of the Assembly. He himself was a state senator, and it was said that nothing of consequence happened in Albany unless it was first approved in the Boss’s seven-room suite there.

But he kept his local positions, too. Commissioner of the New York City schools. Assistant commissioner of streets. President of the board of supervisors. Using all his offices to advantage, Tweed and his cronies had mined a veritable Golconda of graft.

The extent of that mining operation had lately been revealed in the
Times,
with some support from the
Herald
and the
Union.
Theo Payne was contemptuous of the small number of newspapers willing to attack the Boss. Payne said that the silence of at least eighty-nine other papers in the state, both dailies and weeklies, had been bought with fat advertising contracts arranged by Tweed.

Still, certain papers
had
begun to print documentation of Tweed’s crimes. Appalling documentation. It seemed the Boss and his “ring” had really begun to function on a truly grand scale two years earlier. The ring’s other members were City Chamberlain Peter Sweeney, Comptroller Richard Connolly, and Mayor Oakley Hall. In ’69, they had apparently decreed that every invoice rendered to the city or county had to be fraudulently inflated by fifty percent. Lately, it was said, the amount was up to an incredible eighty-five percent. The boodle was divided five ways: one fifth to each of the four ringleaders, with the final one fifth going for assorted political payoffs and favors.

The scope of Tweed’s thievery would have been amusing if it weren’t so appalling, Jephtha thought. The Boss had long since become a Murray Hill millionaire. He maintained a law office he seldom visited, but prestigious clients such as Jay Gould of the Erie paid the firm huge sums just to assure their right to do business locally. Railroad, insurance and ferry companies were required to patronize a printing house in which Tweed owned an interest. The Boss had become a director of numerous street railway and gas transmission companies without investing a cent of his own money.

And if the newspaper revelations were true, the ring’s masterpiece, and its biggest source of revenue, was the new county courthouse being built of marble supplied by a Massachusetts quarry owned by—who else?—the Boss. The town was still agog over one story concerning courthouse graft. It had been documented that a plasterer named Garvey had routinely submitted bills for wages of $50,000 a day—and been paid. Mr. Garvey, this “prince of plasterers,” as the crusading editors called him, had earned a total of $2,807,464.06 in a single season of work! It was assumed that he shared most of his wealth with the ring.

Now, however, a shamed public was beginning to respond to the
Times
stories, and to Thomas Nast’s relentless cartooning in
Harper’s Weekly.
There was talk of a mass meeting to demand legal action. It looked as if Bill Tweed’s heyday might be coming to an end. But that didn’t spell the end of local corruption, Jephtha was sure. It would continue to flourish with greater subtlety and less flagrant disregard for the law.

Jephtha’s pessimism veered in a new direction as he fingered the book in his lap. It was one of his favorites:
Innocents Abroad,
the surprise bestseller of 1869. The author was a young Missouri-born journalist who was giving Artemus Ward stiff competition on the lecture platform. He wrote under the name Mark Twain, a term Mississippi riverboat men used for calling out the depth of water.

More than slightly irreverent, Mr. Twain. Amusing, though. Jephtha couldn’t have admitted it to his congregation, but he relished Twain’s comment about the arid Holy Land. “No Second Advent—Christ has been here once and will never come again.”

Why in thunder couldn’t Kent and Son publish authors of Mr. Twain’s obvious talent? He knew the answer. The editor and general manager, Dana Hughes, was a solid craftsman. But he lacked imagination and nerve. The Boston book company needed a strong hand and a bold mind to direct it. The
Union
needed the same thing, because Theo Payne wouldn’t live forever—especially not at the rate he consumed whiskey.

What the family properties needed was a young family member in charge! Alas, there was no Kent to shoulder the responsibility.

Matt was living the dubious life of a Bohemian in London. One of his pictures had been accepted by the British Royal Academy for its annual exhibition, but that success was balanced by a personal loss. In one of his wretchedly spelled letters, he’d reported in a casual way that he and his wife had
brokin up.
Where Dolly was now, Matt didn’t say, but the news of an apparent divorce distressed Jephtha greatly.

And Gideon—well, that was even sadder. Thanks to God-given intelligence, a bent for self-improvement, and the encouragement of his wife, Margaret, who had helped him learn to read and understand difficult material, then write down his own thoughts in acceptable prose, Jephtha Kent’s oldest son definitely had the ability to guide one or both of the family businesses, which had been repurchased from Louis Kent’s estate after his death in ’68. Unfortunately, Gideon wasn’t interested in the daily paper
or
the publishing house.

After the war, he’d worked for a short time as a switchman in the Erie Railroad yards over in Jersey City. During a winter storm, a good friend of his had died in a work-related accident. Gideon had seen the effect of the tragedy on his friend’s family. He’d also seen how reluctant the Erie owners were to pay so much as a penny of postmortem benefits. Gideon had finally forced a payment from the railroad, and ever since, the tragic accident and the indifference of the bosses had influenced and directed his life. All he cared about was the cause of the workingman.

A worthy cause, certainly. But narrow. Dangerous, on occasion. And almost universally scorned. Jephtha had never grown accustomed to hearing his own son sneered at as a Red or an anarchist.

Now Gideon was busy editing a little labor newspaper, which he’d started with an advance from his inheritance. Only a relative handful of railroad workers read
Labor’s Beacon,
but Gideon seemed unperturbed. In a way, Jephtha was proud of his son for following his conscience; the best of the Kents always did. At the same time, he also hated to see his son squander his talent. By taking a position with the
Union
or even with Kent and Son, Gideon could promote many worthwhile causes, not just one. He could reach and influence many millions of people, not just two or three hundred.

And if ever there was a time in which the country desperately needed men of conviction and principle who were willing to speak out, it was now.

Jephtha’s mood persisted throughout the weekend, as he went to worship at a Long Branch church and then returned to the house and threw himself into finishing the spring chores. He got most of them done, leaving only the remaining shutters to be taken down by the boy he hired on the way to the depot on Monday morning.

As he climbed the steps of the coach of the Raritan & Delaware Railroad, the pain struck him again. The conductor leaped forward to steady him.

“Sir, are you all right?”

Obviously he wasn’t, but he was too short of breath to reply. He clutched the hand rail and dragged himself up into the vestibule, then inside. He collapsed on a hard wooden seat in the grimy car. The pain persisted for the first twenty minutes of the northbound trip. It had never lasted so long. Never. He was terrified.

When it finally passed, his thoughts focused again on his own mortality—and on the family. The brightest spot in the whole picture was the presence of Michael Boyle, the Irishman who’d served Amanda Kent so faithfully as a clerk and surrogate son.

After Jephtha’s youngest boy, Jeremiah, had been lost in the war, he had prayed and pondered and finally willed Jeremiah’s share of the California fortune to Michael. He had never once regretted it. The Irishman had immediately taken Kent as his legal middle name, and he was a better member of the family than someone like the deceased Louis had ever been.

Still, Michael would never play an active role in making the Kent family useful to society on a broad scale. The Irishman was hundreds of miles to the west, permanently settled in the town of Cheyenne, in the Wyoming Territory.

He was married to a fine young woman named Hannah, the daughter of a German immigrant. They were raising a family and managing an expanding chain of general merchandise stores along the Union Pacific route. Recently they’d begun to branch out into feeding and finishing Texas beef cattle for the Eastern market.

The Boyles did their share to better conditions around them. Hannah had helped raise money to start a new church in Cheyenne. She’d also worked on a committee that had helped make Wyoming the first state or territory to grant women the right to vote. That had happened in 1869.