CHAPTER I
THE CURTAIN RISES
"For the Lord's sake, Jennie--"
Dick Welford paused at the bottom of a range of steps which wound up the capitol hill from Pennsylvania Avenue.
The girl standing at the top stamped her foot imperiously.
"Hurry--hurry!"
"I won't--"
"Then I'll leave you!"
The boy laughed.
"You don't dare. It's barely sunup--still dark in spots--the boogers'll get you--"
With a grin he deliberately sat down.
"Dick Welford, you're the laziest white man I ever saw in my life--We won't get a seat, I tell you--"
"We can stand up."
"We won't even get our noses in the door--"
"You don't think these old Senators get up at daylight, do you?"
"They didn't go to bed last night--"
"I'll bet they didn't!" Dick laughed.
"I know one that didn't anyhow--"
"Who?" "Senator Davis."
"How do you know?"
"Spent the night there. Father stayed so late, Mrs. Davis put me to bed. Regular procession all night long! And among his visitors the Blackest Republican of them all--"
"Old Abe run over from Illinois to say good-by?"
"No, but his right hand man Seward did--"
"Sly old snuff-dipping hypocrite--"
"Anyhow, he's the brains of his party."
"And he called on Jeff Davis last night?"
"Not the first time either. Mrs. Davis told me that when the Senator was so ill with neuralgia and came near losing his sight, Seward came every day, sat in the darkened room and talked for hours to his enemy--"
"That's because he's a Black Republican. Their ways are dark. They like rooms with the shades pulled down--"
"Anyhow he likes Mr. Davis."
"Well, it's good-by to the old Union--how many Senators are going to-day?"
"Yulee and Mallory from Florida, Clay and Fitzpatrick from Alabama and Senator Davis--"
"All in a day?"
"Yes--"
"Jennie, they'll talk their heads off. It'll be three o'clock before the first one finishes. We'll die. Let's go to Mt. Vernon--"
"Dick Welford, I'm ashamed of you. You've no patriotism at all--"
"And I just proposed a pilgrimage to the home of George Washington!"
"You don't care what happens in the Senate Chamber to-day--"
"No--I don't."
The boy's lazy figure slowly rose, mounted the steps, paused and looked down into the tense eager young face.
"You really want to know," he began slowly, "why speaking tires me now?"
"Yes--why?"
"Because it's a waste of breath--we're going to fight!"
The girl flushed with excitement.
"Who told you? What have you heard? Who said so?"
A dreamy look in the boy's eyes deepened.
"Nobody's told me. I just know. It's in the air. A wild duck knows when to go north. A bluebird knows when to move south. It's in the air. That's the way I know--" his voice dropped. "Let's go to Mt. Vernon and spend the day, Jennie--"
The girl looked up sharply. The low persuasive tones were unmistakable.
The faintest flush mantled her cheeks.
"No--I wouldn't miss those speeches for anything. You promised to take me to the Senate gallery. Come on."
With a quick bound the boy scaled the next flight of steps and looked down at her laughing:
"All right, why don't _you_ come on!"
With a frown she sprang up the stone stairs and he caught her step with a sudden military salute. They walked in silence for a few minutes.
"What's the matter with you to-day, Dick Welford?"
"Why, Miss Jennie Barton?"
"I never saw you quite so foolish."
"Maybe it's because I never saw you quite so pretty--"
The little figure stiffened with dignity.
"That will do now, sir--"
"Yessum!"
She threw him a look of quiet scorn as they picked their way through the piles of building material for the unfinished dome of the Capitol and mounted the steps.
Barely half past seven o'clock and the crowds were pouring into the Senate Chamber, its cloak rooms and galleries. Within thirty minutes after they had found seats opposite the diplomatic gallery every inch of space in the great hall was jammed and packed.
Southern women and their escorts outnumbered the others five to one. The Southern wing of official Washington was out in force.
The tense electric atmosphere was oppressive.
The men and women whose eager anxious faces looked down on the circular rows of senatorial chairs and desks were painfully conscious that they were witnessing the final scene of a great historical era.
What the future might hold God alone could know. Their fathers had dreamed a beautiful dream--"_E Pluribus Unum_"--one out of many. The Union had yet to be realized as an historical fact. The discordant elements out of which our Constitution had been strangely wrought had fought their way at last into two irreconcilable hostile sections, the very structure of whose civilization rested on antagonistic conceptions of life and government.
The Northern Senators were in their seats with grave faces long before the last straggling Southerner picked his way into the Chamber bowing and smiling and apologizing to the ladies on whose richly embroidered dresses he must step or give up the journey.
For weeks the pretense of polite formalities between parties had been unconsciously dropped. Men no longer bowed and smirked and passed the time of day with shallow words.
With heads erect, they glanced at each other and passed on. And if they spoke, it was with taunt, insult and challenge.
Jennie's keen eyes rested on two vacant chairs on the floor of the Senate--every seat was crowded save these two.
She pressed Dick's arm.
"See--the vacant seats of South Carolina!"
"They're not vacant," the boy drawled.
"They are--look--"
"I see a white figure in each--"
"Nonsense!" "We're going to have war, I tell you! Death sits in those chairs to-day, Jennie--"
"Sh--don't talk like that--"
The boy laughed.
"I'm not afraid, you know--just a sort of second sight--maybe it means I'll be killed--"
* * * * *
South Carolina had felt no forebodings on the day her Convention had recalled those Senators. Kiett the eloquent leader of the Convention sprang to his feet, his face flaming with passion that was half delirium as he shouted:
"This day is the culmination of long years of bitterness, of suffering and of struggle. We are performing a great deed, which holds in its magic not only the stirring present, it embraces the ages yet to come. I am content with what has been done to-day. I shall be content with it to-morrow. We have lowered the body of the old Union to its last resting place. We drop the flag over its grave."
When the vote was announced, without a single dissenting voice, the crowd rose to their feet with a shout of applause which shook the building to its foundations. It died away at last only to rise again with redoubled fury.
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida had followed in rapid succession, Louisiana's Convention was to meet on the twenty-sixth, Texas on February first. On this the twenty-first day of January the Senators from Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had announced their farewell addresses to the Old Union.
The girl's eyes swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief, bonnet or dress--every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had been imported direct from the fashion centers of Europe. Gowns of priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of Genoa, Venice and Brussels.
The South was rich.
And yet not one of her representatives held his office in Washington because of his money. Her ruling classes were without exception an aristocracy of brains--yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.
The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.
The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for discussion had passed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two vast sectional divisions on the issue.
Beyond the fierce and uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown into a consuming passion throughout the North and had resulted in the election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate--behind and underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental fact--the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and the fullness thereof were his.
And bigger than the fear of the confiscation of their property and the destruction of the Constitution their fathers had created loomed before the Southern mind the Specter of a new democracy at the touch of whose fetid breath the soul of culture and refinement they believed must die. In the vulgar ranks of this democracy must march sooner or later four million negroes but yesterday from the jungles of Africa.
This greater issue was felt but dimly by the leaders on either side but it was realized with sufficient clearness to make compromise impossible.
In vain did the aged and the feeble plead once more for compromise. Real men no longer wished it.
The day of reckoning had come. The seeds of this tragedy were planted in the foundation structure of the Republic.
The Union of our fathers, for all the high sounding phrases of its Declaration of Independence was not a democracy. It was from the beginning an aristocratic republic founded squarely on African Slavery. And the degraded position assigned to the man who labored with his hands was recognized in our organic law.
The Constitution itself was the work of a rich and powerful group of leaders in each State, and its provisions were a compromise of conflicting sectional property interests.
The world had moved from 1789 to 1861.
The North was unconsciously lifting the banner of a mighty revolution. The South was clinging with the desperation of despair to the faith of its fathers.
The North was the world of steam and electricity, of new ideas, of progress. The South still believed in the divine inspiration of the men who founded the Republic. They must believe in it, for their racial life depended on it. Four million negroes could not be loosed among five million Southern white people and two such races live side by side under the principles of a pure democracy. Had this issue been put to them in the beginning not one Southern State would have entered the Union.
The Northern workingman, with steam and electricity bringing North and South into closer and closer touch, answered this cry of fear from the South with the ultimatum of democracy:
"This Nation can not endure half slave and half free!"
Back of all the mouthings of demagogues and the billingsgate of sectionalists lay this elemental fact--a democracy against a republic.
Nor could the sword of the Sections settle such an issue. The sectional sword could only settle an issue which grew out of it--whether a group of States holding a common interest in this conflict of principles could combine for their own peace and safety, leave the old Union, form a new one and settle it in their own way.
The North said no--the South said yes. This conviction bigger than party platforms was the brooding terror which brought the sense of tragedy to young and old, the learned and the unlearned--that made young men see visions and maids dream of mighty deeds.
* * * * *
The Southern boy's eyes had again rested on the vacant chairs of the Senators from South Carolina with a set look in their depths.
The crowd turned with sudden stir to the door of the Senate Chamber.
"Look," Jennie cried, "that's Mrs. Clem Clay of Alabama--how pale and beautiful she is! The Senator's going to make the speech of his life to-day. She's scared--Ah, that dress, that dress--isn't it a dream? Did you ever see such a piece of velvet--and--do look at that dear little gold hand holding the skirt up just high enough to see the exquisite lace on her petticoat--"
"Where's the golden hand--I don't see it?" Dick broke in skeptically.
"Don't you see the chain hanging from her waist?"
"Yes, I see that."
"Follow it with your eye and you'll see the hand. The Bayard sisters introduced them from Paris, you know."
The boy had ceased to listen to Jennie's chatter. His eye had suddenly rested on a group of three men seated in the diplomatic gallery--one evidently of high official position by the deference paid him. The man on the left of the official was young, handsome, slender, and pulled the corners of his mustache with a slow lazy touch of his graceful hand. His eyes were fixed on Jennie with a steady gaze. The Minister from Sardinia, of the Court of Victor Emmanuel, sat on the right, bowing and gesticulating with an enthusiasm out of all proportion to the importance of the conversation.
Behind this group sat a fourth man who leaned forward occasionally and whispered to the official. His face was in shadow and the only thing Dick could see was the thick dark brown beard which covered his regular features and a pair of piercing black eyes.
"For heaven's sake, Jennie," the boy cried at last, "who is that villain in the Diplomatic gallery?"
"Where?"
"In the corner there on the right."
"Oh, that's the Sardinian Minister--King Victor Emmanuel's new drummer of trade for Genoa. He's getting ahead of the French, too."
"No--no, I don't mean that little rat. I mean the big fellow with the heavy jaw and a face like a rattlesnake. He's trying to charm you too."
Jennie laughed.
"Silly! That's the new Secretary of War, Joseph Holt."
"A scoundrel, if God ever made one--"
"Because he looks at me?"
"No--that shows his good taste. It's the way he looks at you and moves his crooked mouth and the way he bends his big flat head forward."
"Rubbish--he's a loyal Southerner--and if we have to fight he'll be with us."
"Yes--he--_will_!"
"Of course, he will. He's careful now. He's in old Buck's cabinet. Wait and see. He called on Mr. Davis last night."
"That's nothing--so did old Seward--" "Different--Seward's a Black Republican from New York--Holt's a Southern Democrat from Mississippi."
"And who's the young knight by his side with the dear little mustache to which he seems so attached?"
Jennie looked in silence for a moment.
"I never saw him before. He's handsome, isn't he?"
"Looks to me like a young black snake just shed his skin waiting for that old adder to show him how to strike."
"Dick--"
"God save the Queen! They're coming here--they're coming for you--"
The Secretary of War had nodded in recognition of Jennie, risen suddenly, and moved toward the gallery exit with his slender companion.
"Nonsense, Dick--he only bowed because he saw me staring--"
"He's bringing that mustache to meet you--"
The boy turned with a scowl toward the door of their gallery and saw the Secretary of War slowly making his way through the crowd to their seats.
"I told you so--"
Jennie blushed and smiled in friendly response to the Secretary's awkward effort at Southern politeness.
"Miss Barton, may I ask a little favor of you?"
"Certainly, Mr. Holt. Allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. Welford of Virginia."
The Secretary bowed stiffly and Dick nodded his head with indifference.
"The Italian Minister with whom I've just been talking wishes the honor of an introduction for his Secretary. Miss Jennie, will you meet him?"
"Certainly--"
"He's looking forward to the possible new Empire of the South," Holt whispered, "and proposes at an early day to forestall the French--"
Dick threw him a look of scorn as he returned to the door and rose with a scowl.
"I'll go out and get fresh air."
"Don't go--"
"I can't breathe in here. Two's company and three's a crowd."
She seized his arm:
"Please sit down, Dick."
"I'll be back directly--"
In spite of her protest he bounded up the steps of the gallery, turned sharply to the right, avoided the intruders and disappeared in the crowd.
The Secretary of War bowed again:
"Miss Barton, permit me to introduce to you Signor Henrico Socola, Secretary to His Excellency, the Minister of Sardinia."
The slender figure bent low with an easy grace.
"Pleased to meet you, Signor Socola," Jennie responded, lifting the heavy lashes from her lustrous brown eyes with the slightest challenge to his.
"The pleasure is all mine, Mad'moiselle," he gravely replied.
"You'll excuse me now if I hurry on?" the Secretary said, again bowing and disappearing in the crowd.
"Mr. Holt tells me, Miss Barton, that you know every Senator on the floor."
"Yes. My father has been in Congress and the Senate for twenty years."
"You'll explain the drama to me to-day when the curtain rises?"
"If I can."
"I'll be so much obliged--" he paused and the even white teeth smiled pleasantly. "I'm pretty well up on American history but confess a little puzzled to-day. Your Southern Senators are really going to surrender their power here without a struggle?"
"What do you mean?" the girl asked with a slight frown.
"That your Democratic party has still a majority in both the House and the Senate. If the Southern members simply sit still in their places, the incoming administration of Abraham Lincoln will be absolutely powerless. The new President can not even call a cabinet to his side without their consent."
"The North has elected their President," Jennie answered with decision. "The South scorns to stoop to the dishonor of cheating them out of it. They've won the election. They can have it. The South will go and build a government of her own--as we built this one--"
"And fight twenty-three million people of the North?"
"If forced to--yes!"
"With the certainty of an uprising of your slaves at home?"
Jennie laughed.
"Our slaves would fight for us if we'd let them--"
A curious smile twitched the lips of the Italian.
"You speak with great confidence, Miss Barton!"
"Yes. I know what I'm talking about."
The keen eyes watched her from the shadows of the straight thick brows.
"And your Senators who took a solemn oath in entering this Chamber to support the Constitution will leave their seats in violation of that oath?"
The Southern girl flushed, turned with quick purpose to answer, laughed and said with winning frankness:
"You don't mind if I give you my father's answer in his own words? I know them by heart--"
"By all means."
"An oath to support the Constitution of the United States does _not_ bind the man who takes it to support an administration elected by a mob whose purpose is to subvert the Constitution!"
"Oh,--I see," was the quiet response.
"You speak English with perfection, Signor!" Jennie said with a smile.
"Yes, Mad'moiselle, I've spent my life in the Diplomatic service." He bowed gravely, lifted his head and caught the smile on the lips of the Secretary of War standing in the shadows of the doorway of the Diplomatic gallery.
The stately figure of John C. Breckinridge, the Vice-President, suddenly mounted the dais and his piercing eyes swept the assembly. He rapped for order and the silence which followed was as the hush of death.
"The curtain rises on our drama, Mad'moiselle," the smooth even voice said.
"Sh!" the girl whispered.