North and South: The North and South Trilogy (45 page)

“All day long. Like a puppy! It’s embarrassing.” But Orry’s expression said he really didn’t mind the hero worship. “Trouble is, you solve one problem and the solution creates another.”

“What now? You’ve been saying Charles is straightening out—”

“That’s exactly what I mean. He is. Before, I was positive he’d wind up dead in some ditch after a brawl or a horse race. Now I’m wracking my brain to figure out what he should do with his life. I must suggest something, and soon.”

“You sound like a father.”

“Don’t joke. It’s no small responsibility.”

“Of course it isn’t. I wasn’t joking. I was smiling because you’re happy. I’ve never seen you in such good spirits. You like the responsibility.”

He looked at her. “Yes. I do.”

After supper every night, if Orry had no work in the office, he and Charles would take a whiskey together in the library. Sometimes Tillet joined them, but if so, he was a silent participant. Silent and amazed. He knew something positive and wholesome had happened in the relationship between his son and his nephew. He didn’t want to interfere. He also realized that, in spirit and in fact, Orry was fast becoming the head of the family. Tillet resented that more than a little. Yet it pleased him, too. Cousin Charles was reserved when Tillet was present. When he wasn’t, the young man couldn’t hear enough about Orry’s experiences as a cadet.

“You really liked it at West Point?”

“Well, not completely. But I made several good friends—and I met my best friend there.”

“George.” When Orry nodded, Charles asked, “Did you want to stay in the Army?”

“Very much. General Scott, however, has this unreasonable prejudice against any officer with just one arm. Maybe it’s because he still has two.”

Charles smiled. It wasn’t much of a jest, but he realized that never before had Orry been able to make light of his injury. It was a remarkable change.

Charles returned his gaze to the uniform on the stand. “I just can’t get over the idea that you can fight and get paid for it.”

Orry held his breath. Was this the right moment? He seized on it.

“Charles—here’s a thought. It’s possible that we could secure an Academy appointment for you.”

“But—I’m not smart enough.”

“Yes, you are. You just don’t know enough to pass the entrance examinations. In other words, you have the intelligence but not the facts. Herr Nagel could certainly give you those in the next year or so. You’d have to apply yourself, but I know you can do it if you have the desire.”

Stunned by the new future he had glimpsed, Cousin Charles sat a moment before answering.

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“First-rate! I’ll corner Nagel in the morning.”

“What?” the tutor cried when he heard Orry’s plan. “Instruct
him?
I should say not, Herr Main. The first time I reprimand him for failing to complete an assignment, he will whip out that gigantic knife and
pfut!”
Nagel’s thumb slashed across his throat. “Thus ends my brilliant academic service to this family.”

“Charles has changed,” Orry assured him. “Give him a chance. I’ll pay you a bonus.”

On that basis Herr Nagel was happy to gamble. At week’s end he came back to his employer with a stunned look.

“You are absolutely right. The transformation is astonishing. He remains stubborn and irritable over some things—chiefly his own unfamiliarity with concepts he should have learned long before this. But he’s quick. I believe I can bring him along rapidly, though naturally it will require some, ah, extra effort.”

“For which you’ll receive extra compensation every week.”

“You are too kind,” Herr Nagel murmured, bowing. “We shall make a scholar of that one yet.”

There was exhilaration in Orry’s voice and a sparkle in his eyes. “We just want to make him a West Point cadet. There’s going to be a professional soldier in this family.” To himself he added, “After all.”

At the end of the first week of April, Orry went to his father. “In two or three years, Charles should be ready to enter the Academy. I’ve learned there’ll be a vacancy at that time. It isn’t too early to secure the appointment for him. We might start with a letter to the War Department. We could ask Senator Calhoun to transmit it. Shall I write it, or will you?”

Tillet showed him a copy of the
Mercury.
“Calhoun’s dead.”

“Good God. When?”

“The last day of March. In Washington.”

It shouldn’t have come as a great surprise, Orry realized. Calhoun had been failing for a long time, and politically the past month had been one of the stormiest in recent history. Henry Clay’s compromise resolutions had come up for Senate debate. Because Calhoun was the South’s senior spokesman, his reaction, although predictable, was widely awaited. But he’d been too ill to take the floor. Senator Mason had read his remarks for him. Of course Calhoun denounced the Clay program and warned again that Northern hostility was making secession attractive to Southerners. Over the years Calhoun had moved steadily away from a nationalistic position to one that put the welfare of his section first. Most Southerners agreed that he had been driven to this hardened and parochial stand by the activities of the abolitionists, both in and out of Congress.

Three days after Calhoun’s speech was presented, Senator Daniel Webster had risen to plead the opposite view. He had spoken eloquently in favor of the resolutions and of the urgent need to put preservation of the Union above all else. The speech was too full of goodwill and the spirit of compromise for many of Webster’s Northern colleagues, who promptly began vilifying him. Tillet, too, called Webster’s seventh of March address an abomination—though not for the same reasons the abolitionist senators did.

But at the moment Orry was thinking of Calhoun from another perspective. “The senator was one of the Academy’s staunchest friends.”

“Once,” Tillet snapped. “He was also a friend of the Union. So were we all. Then the Yankees turned on us.”

Tillet seemed to suggest the attack had been causeless. Orry thought of Priam but said nothing. The unexpected pang of conscience surprised and troubled him. His father went on:

“It wasn’t merely old age and sickness that killed John Calhoun. It was Jackson, Garrison, Seward—that whole damned crowd who opposed him, and us, in everything from nullification to the way we earn our bread. They harried Calhoun like a pack of mad dogs. They exhausted him.” Tillet flung the newspaper on the floor. “It won’t be forgotten.”

Orry remained silent, upset by his father’s unforgiving tone.

A few weeks later Tillet had further cause for outrage. A slave who had run away from a plantation near Mont Royal was recaptured in Columbus, Ohio, by a professional slave catcher. The slave catcher had been hired by the owner of the runaway.

Before the man and his prisoner could leave Columbus, abolitionists intervened. They threatened the slave catcher with lynching and took the escaped black into protective custody, saying it was necessary for a court to rule on the legality of the claim. That was a subterfuge; they knew the court had no jurisdiction. But the delay gave them time to spirit the runaway out of jail. A rear door was mysteriously left unlocked. The fugitive was over the border and safe in Canada before most people knew about it. The unsubtle intrigue in Ohio outraged the slave’s owner and many of his neighbors. Tillet talked of little else.

Orry, meantime, shared his personal happiness with Madeline. Cousin Charles had settled down to studies with Herr Nagel, and Orry could hardly stop boasting about his protégé’s progress.

“We’ll have to suspend the lessons for two months this summer, though.” It was a clumsy way to introduce another subject that was on his mind, but it had to be done.

“Charles is leaving?”

“Along with the rest of us. I’ve leased a summer cottage in Newport, near George’s place.”

“You’ll have your reunion at last!”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Orry, how exciting.” Her response seemed genuine. If she felt disappointment, she hid it well.

“You won’t miss me?”

“Don’t tease. I’ll miss you terribly. Those two months will be the longest of my life.”

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so passionately that the little volume of Cullen Bryant’s poems slipped off her lap unnoticed. After she caught her breath she said, “But I’ll survive. That is, I will as long as I know you’ll come back to me. I couldn’t bear it if you took up with some Yankee girl.”

“I’d never do that,” Orry replied with that humorless sincerity Madeline found touching sometimes; on other occasions, for no reason she could explain, it infuriated her. He went on, “It’s time Charles got a peek at the world beyond the borders of South Carolina. If he goes to the Academy, he’ll meet all sorts of people with new and different ideas. That can be a shock. It was to me. He must be prepared.”

She touched his face. “You sound more like a father every day.”

“Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“Nothing.” She gave his cheek a wifely peck. “It’s grand for Charles, but he’s not the only one getting benefits from this new relationship—not by any means. You’re so much happier. That makes me happy, too.”

When she kissed him this time, it was to demonstrate the sincerity of what she had just said. A few moments later, as she was leaning down to retrieve the book, a question occurred to her.

“You say the entire family’s going to Rhode Island?”

“Not Cooper, of course.”

“That’s what I meant. Was the choice to stay home his or your father’s?”

Cooper had visited Mont Royal two nights ago. He and Tillet had been unable to stay in the same room without quarreling violently over the Clay resolutions. Orry’s smile disappeared.

“Both,” he said.

C
OOPER MAIN LOVED CHARLESTON.

He loved its narrow, cobbled streets, which reminded many visitors of Europe; the expensive merchandise sold in its shops; the peal of bells from all the white church spires that had weathered salt air and sea gales for so many years. He loved the political rhetoric overheard in the saloon bar of the Charleston Hotel; the clatter of the drays whose drivers were constantly being fined for racing through the streets at dangerous speeds; the glow of the street lamps after one of the two municipal lamplighters, or one of their half-dozen slaves, had passed by. And he loved the house he had bought with some of the first year’s profits of the Carolina Shipping Company.

The house was on Tradd Street, right around the corner from the famous old Heyward residence. It was a typical Charleston house, designed for coolness and privacy. Each of its three floors had a piazza, and each piazza ran the length of the building, or about sixty feet. The house was twenty feet deep, the width of a single room, and was situated on the lot so that one long side was flush with the public sidewalk.

Although the house was entered from this side, the opposite one facing the garden was considered the front. Cooper called the garden his second office. Behind a high brick wall he often worked for hours on company matters, surrounded by the seasonal beauties of azaleas and magnolias and the contrasting greens of the crape myrtle and the yucca. He thought it a shame that he lived in such a beautiful house all by himself.

But he didn’t think of that often; he was too busy. He had turned his quasi-exile into a triumphant success along with the little cotton packet company. He was now in the process of doubling the company’s warehouse space by means of an addition. He never consulted his father about such decisions. Tillet still thought of the Carolina Shipping Company as a burden, a financial risk. That left Cooper free to run it his way.

The company’s headquarters, warehouse, and pier were located on Concord Street, above the U.S. Customs House. The company symbol, appearing on a signboard in front as well as on the ensigns of its two rickety packets, was an oval of ship’s line surrounding three shorter pieces of line arranged to represent the letters C.S.C.

Cooper knew Charleston would never be
the
cotton port, as it had once been
the
rice port. Alabama and Mississippi dominated cotton production now. But Charleston still shipped a respectable tonnage, and Cooper wanted an ever bigger share for C.S.C. For that reason, a few months ago he had mortgaged everything and placed an order with the Black Diamond Boat Yard of Brooklyn, New York, for a new packet of modern, indeed advanced, design.

She would be driven by a screw propeller, not side wheels. Below decks, three transverse bulkheads would create four compartments that could be made watertight. In the event the hull was breached on coastal rocks, cargo in the undamaged compartments could be saved.

The bulkheads added substantially to the cost of the packet. But Cooper had already described the innovation to a couple of local cotton factors, and their reaction had been so positive he knew the extra expenditure would give his vessel an edge over its competition—and never mind that packets didn’t run aground that often. It was the provision for what might happen that influenced a factor’s choice of a ship.

A break in the hull was even less likely because of a second unusual feature—the use of iron instead of wood. Hazard Iron would supply a special run of plate for the hull.

Cooper was proud of the design of the new packet, which was to be christened
Mont Royal.
Before drawing up a list of features and performance specifications and taking them to Brooklyn, he had spent months reading up on naval architecture and filling sketch pads. Black Diamond’s president said that if Cooper ever tired of Charleston, they would hire him—and it wasn’t entirely a joke.

Cooper had little trouble arranging financing for his project. Although the Charleston bankers didn’t care for his political views, they liked his business ideas, his confidence, and his record thus far. He had already increased the volume of C.S.C. by eighty percent and its profits by twenty. He had accomplished it by refurbishing the old packets so that they were more dependable and by offering discounts to factors who placed a large part of their business with him.