Japhy
Banned
The riotous mob, in spite of their racial handicaps, cheered the former President as they passed his downtown mansion on their way to lynch more negroes. Political allegiance of the past was forgotten, he had after all, not delivered much in the fight he had led against Papism, but he wasn’t a Republican, and in these anarchic hours that was all that mattered.
As New York burned around him, and the Union-men, merchants and freedmen of the city waited for the Army of the Potomac --- bloodied, tired and laurel-bound after the struggle that had finally bested Beauregard in Pennsylvania --- to arrive with vengeance, ex-President George Law stared out the large windows of his office, and watched the distant glow of flames.
History will blame this on you too. He thought to himself. You saw to it that most of them were trained, when Houston told you it was best to leave these Irish Volunteers out of the rolls.
When the mobs had passed more than a few men had kit from the War of 1857. While a few of them could be deserters from the current struggle, even one Irishmen who had served in the war started by a Know-Nothing president to add more slave states to the Union would be enough. And with that there would be one more thing by which to damn George Law.
It had been so easy, a decade ago, when it had all started.
When Fillmore and Pierce had been Presidents, and he had send the Crecent City to Havana demanding the colonial caudillo governor relent on challenging his God-given right to send his own employees anywhere on the globe knowing as Americans no damned dago would stop them.
It had he knew even then been a farce for PR. One had to keep the U.S. Mail Steamship Company in the papers for something other than the shoddy service and terrible conditions on the way to Aspinwall. The letters accusing Presidents who refused to accept America’s Manifest Destiny, as cowards was easy. Especially because they were.
After that? Oh how simple it had all been. He’d found the country ripe for something, anything besides the deadlock and uselessness that the slavery debate had started. And they’d found it in George Law.
The biography he’d paid to be written sold well, everyone liked the story of a self-made man from nowhere, gone to Troy and then New York and made good. They liked his attacks on the elites of Washington, regardless of if they were part of the moribund Whigs, corrupt Democrats or black Republicans. And, well the up and coming movement in the country, good patriotic citizens who might not have been the best educated but knew, at least, when something was wrong with the country on a core level, they’d loved him too. They loved him, and were pleased no small amount that there was finally a voice on the national stage that was willing to shout honest truths, willing to say “No!” to rule by Rome.
It had been easy to turn himself into a brand. Even easier when he’d moved from shipping and railways to the news. Desperate editors would say anything to keep their jobs and fund their presses when he was writing the checks. He just had to talk about the right issues, and ignore the others. How easy was that? To say nothing on the dirty business of slavery? Far easier than trying to worm his way to one stance or the other in a weak attempt to appease one side or the other like Pierce or the Republicans did, dividing the country more and more in the process.
In 1855 the Pennsylvania legislature endorsed his run for President at the head of the now unifying American Party. The southern parties were quick to follow. The only opposition? That weak, cowardly failure Fillmore, promising to make good as the American nominee what he had failed so terribly at doing while President before, and the last nominee of the Whigs in 1852. The challenge a joke, the nomination had been a cakewalk, and with Andrew Jackson’s namesake and nephew at his side, Law had jumped right into the election.
McLean with the Republicans, a tired old waste of a judge and Buchanan a cowardly, snivelling careerist had been horrified as he eschewed their pathetic traditions and led the campaign of a successful businessmen.
Who would speak for Law? Law of course.
While they stayed in Washington DC, cut off from the rest of the country and its realities, he’d crossed the nation by Steamship, Train and Steamboat. cris-crossing the North, the South and the near West he’d talked repeatedly about the dangers inherent in the division of the country. How the old colonial powers of Southern Europe would join the German, Irish and Jewish hordes descending on America’s ports in draping all of the New World in the slavish Pope-worship of old, and crush the already broken democracy of the Republic. And how their agents, the elites of Washington City would already not lift a finger, devoted as they were to the drunken mobs of unemployed, foreign Tammany voters that cheated their way onto the voting roles.
It has worked. Or mostly worked. Yes, if he admitted it he hadn’t quite won the election in 1856, but it had hardly mattered.
California, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, and Tennessee had been enough. The electoral college in deadlock he had gone and done what tired old radical, fringe-party-jumping, activist Supreme Court holdouts and capital insiders without conviction could never have done.
He made the deals. The southerners knew what he was planning and dreamed of seeing the completion of their hero Polk’s vision. And enough northerners were aware enough of the growing problems developing in the cities and though they couldn’t admit it too often, agreed on the solutions.
Patronage had been handed out. Investments had been made. He hadn’t created corrupt bargains but obviously brilliant deals. And so it was that in the spring of 1857 he had become President.
Everything had been so easy before.
But then, once in office things had changed.
For a moment he was out of the past, back in the hot summer of 1864. Somewhere off in the north, the occasional shot of a rifled musket, and the alarm bells were being replaced by something more ominous. Major General Sanford, NYSM was on the scene obviously, as the deeper blasts of cannon and the cacophony of entire companies firing at once, forced itself to echo over the twilight air.
The War with Spain had been easy enough to start. And at first popular enough.
He’d refused to allow organized foreign units. There were no New York Italian regiments or Irish brigades, he’d allowed the Highlanders to serve obviously though, that had been different, but those unwashed, drunken, incest-mad mobs had been taken in anyway, so long as they were scattered in the other units each state had offered.
He had though seen the raising of thousands of volunteers, had seen the navy commission and charter hundreds of ships. Had seen contracts sent out to fortify the cities of the coast from the black Armada’s horrors.
But there’d been trouble. the campaign in Eastern Cuba for Santiago had been a bloody sog. With many, many times more men killed by Yellow Fever and Malaria than the Spaniards.
And when the landings around Havana and on the island of Porto Rico had begun things had taken a far more troublesome turn.
Massachusetts had quit the war first, with Governor Banks refusing to send even a regiment more for service until a law had been passed demanding either independence for the islands, or that they be turned into Free Territories, regardless of how many slaves the Spanish already had on the island.
That in turn had become a problem when the Supreme Court finally ruled on a decision, on sectional lines, six to nine that some damned negro had no standing in the court and that there was no such thing as a “Free Territory” anyway. In peacetime it would have been trouble. In the middle of a war with Spain it had been a disaster for Law.
Recruitment in New England, so promoted by his Secretary of War dried up. Massachusetts was joined by Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Michigan in refusing to deploy transport troops to the embarkation ports.
The South had cried bloody murder. Jefferson Davis, one time Secretary of War and now serving as a Corps Commander in the lines outside of Havana wrote a letter published in every Southern paper calling for Martial Law in Boston. They hollered ‘till they were hoarse about “A Second Hartford.” All the while Republican Senators screamed of the Knights of the Golden Circle, war for Empire, and Slave Power.
He had tried to force a compromise. Offered Federal grants for railroads. Offered to bring in New Mexico as a Slave state on one hand and offered to bring in Kansas as once as a Free State --- the bloody mess of that territory having been a problem to ignore from day one, as Pierce had before him--- called for constitutional amendments to draw a line across the country for Slavery. But none of it worked. They had all been too devoted to their damned ideals and principles.
Eventually the lines around Havana broke. Eventually the US fleet and the Spanish relief fleet bound for San Juan met in the Leeward Islands. Albert Sidney Johnston and David Dixon Porter were the heros of the war on land and sea, praised throughout the country.
1858 was the first year in American History that a sitting President left the country, as he headed to Paris to sign the Peace Treaty, the annexation of the two colonies being the core of the agreement hammered out by Secretary of State Rives. Feasts with Napoleon III and Festivals at the Crystal Palace in London with Queen Victoria had followed, as well as the honor of the first transmission sent on the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph. “The European Jaunt” had seemed like a victory triumph.
But much as the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph eventually failed, so too did the festivities.
On the returning to the United States the 1858 Midterms proved to be a disaster. There was no victory boost to see an American majority in the Congress. But there was a Republican one. The Democrats split, with Stephen A. Douglas, the northern party leader coming out for Free Soil, having seen which way the wind was blowing, and Independence for Cuba. What Americans were left seemed to defect to the “Anti-Cuba Democrats” or the Republicans.
In the South things hardened as well. Many an American Party candidate found themselves, if not an outright defector like Governor Richard Taylor, leasing their votes out to Howell Cobb. Allies in the Democrats like Andrew Johnson were in turn rapidly forced to turn their anti-establishment stances in a less Pro-Law direction.
Kansas continued to bleed. The Pro-Slavery government in Cuba under Governor Walker in turn started to burn. John Brown invaded the US Arsenal at Guantanamo Bay and headed into the Mountains, leading a simmering slave revolt that was still going on today, though now it branded itself the “Unionist Insurgency”, and in a somersault over the facts, sat two United States Senators.
The economy had tanked too in the post-war economic cool down. George Law lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many others lost more. It was in an era of deprivation the Republicans had begun investigations into “questionable” contracts in the war. As if a President didn’t have the rights of Patronage. Or wasn’t expected to have the good sense to agree to federal purchases with men he knew and trusted.
It had all been a bloody shambles. His Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Broom was still in Prison. Most of the cabinet had been forced out. The Tenure of Office Act they had passed in the aftermath not only forced him to accept a cabinet of failures, lawyers and politicians, but had set him up for Impeachment if he challenged what the Senate found to be “Acceptable Appointments”. It had also for that matter, forced Samuel Hinks out of a job when it disbanded his Department of Americanization.
And then had come the election of 1860. For a while Law thought that he could buy his re-election. With enough money spent, with enough fair and balanced press coverage secured, he’d be able to overcome his enemies plotting in the shadows. There was no chance for a Democratic reunion, and against three regional parties, the American Party, as the only cross-regional bloc would be able to make leaps and bounds and gain a majority at last.
But then Douglas had bowed out, and thrown his support behind the Republicans and their nominee, one of the heros of the Mexican and Spanish Wars, Commodore Stockton on a platform calling for the ban of Slavery only in the territories, and a system of industrialization.
And then Southern Americans had bolted from the party, and simply nominated the Southern Democratic ticket of Jefferson Davis and New England War Hero and Congressmen Ben Butler.
It was still a regional fight though, and Law was certain, absolutely certain that he could win with a national party, one with the loyalty of the servicemen of the late war, whom he had helped secure a great victory for the nation.
Instead the American Party renamed itself, “The National Union”, and he found himself cut at the knees, the national conglomerate he had created turning on him, tossing him out, declaring his administration and ideals to be “Bankrupted”. They’d abandoned him, and gone ahead and nominated that old career politician Edward Bates on a platform of political compromise and, though they didn’t say it the return to the Washington Elites.
He’d raged.
He’d formed his own party, The People’s Party. He had wrangled Sam Houston into being his running mate.
He hadn’t won a single state. When at least Bates could say he carried Missouri and Maryland.
Stockton became President-elect. Lincoln his junior partner.
And then South Carolina seceded. Followed by Cuba, in an act of treachery that Law still couldn’t forgive. Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. They had declared themselves to be “The Confederate States of America”, they had picked Howell Cobb to go from being their unofficial leader in the Union, to their unofficial leader outside of it. And they had laid siege to Fort Pickens at the mouth of Pensacola Harbor. The Commander of the Fort, a Major Delafield, refused to surrender like his counterparts in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina.
Instead he had spiked the guns the other forts and burned their Cuba-bound supplies in the Harbor and holed up in the easiest to most defensible position.
Law was of the mind that secession was illegal but refused to act. The country after all had fired him. If they didn’t want him, it was going to be Stockton’s problem to deal with not his. But Federal troops trapped in rebel territory was not something he was allowed to sit on.
And so he had ordered the USS Brooklyn to run the southern guns.
And eventually, the word had come back, from the Southern Press first about how that had gone.
The cruiser, burning and tattered, blood across its decks, had failed to make the supply run. It had failed to get out of the harbor for that matter. Commander Walker and his men taken as prisoners of war. Major Delafields starving men forced to watch helplessly.
The Bonnie Blue Flag waved over what eventually became the CSS South Carolina by the end of that day. A final humiliation for the Law administration.
And then the agony was over. Or, more accurately, he simply walked away from the agony, spending his days talking to his New York bankers, planning a retirement of wealth, and walking through the halls of the rotting White House.
He had stood by angrily as Stockton assumed the office, and then left Washington, disinterested in the fall of the city he was sure to follow. He was wrong on that too. And wrong on how long the war would take, as neither Stockton or Cobb proved to be interested at all in his offers for meditating negotiation, refusing to even allow themselves to think like businessmen, refusing to leave their little insider government bubbles.
And so he’d spent the past few years in New York, mostly hated. Refused membership to most clubs, a pariah as his political movement finally died out, not welcomed by companies seeking Federal contracts. He had become old and useless, notable only for the occasional interview with a reporter where he spoke straight truths and was attacked for it.
Outside the Draft Riot raged on. The echoes of battle somewhere uptown not coming any closer. The city still burned. A speech he had given a few weeks ago at a small rally was going to do him no good he was sure, with his denunciation of the Republican administration, and his calls for, as he had always called for “The cutting of a deal”. They will remember you for that most of all. Governor Sickles will see you tried for it. They’ll say you incited this.
Eventually he turned from the window, and put his revolver back in the drawer. There would most likely be no more mobs coming this way tonight. But as he headed for bed, and the alarms kept ringing another thought entered his head.
They may not say anything at all. Because no one cares, and no one will long remember anything you’ve ever done.
And with that, his failures overtook him.
As New York burned around him, and the Union-men, merchants and freedmen of the city waited for the Army of the Potomac --- bloodied, tired and laurel-bound after the struggle that had finally bested Beauregard in Pennsylvania --- to arrive with vengeance, ex-President George Law stared out the large windows of his office, and watched the distant glow of flames.
History will blame this on you too. He thought to himself. You saw to it that most of them were trained, when Houston told you it was best to leave these Irish Volunteers out of the rolls.
When the mobs had passed more than a few men had kit from the War of 1857. While a few of them could be deserters from the current struggle, even one Irishmen who had served in the war started by a Know-Nothing president to add more slave states to the Union would be enough. And with that there would be one more thing by which to damn George Law.
It had been so easy, a decade ago, when it had all started.
When Fillmore and Pierce had been Presidents, and he had send the Crecent City to Havana demanding the colonial caudillo governor relent on challenging his God-given right to send his own employees anywhere on the globe knowing as Americans no damned dago would stop them.
It had he knew even then been a farce for PR. One had to keep the U.S. Mail Steamship Company in the papers for something other than the shoddy service and terrible conditions on the way to Aspinwall. The letters accusing Presidents who refused to accept America’s Manifest Destiny, as cowards was easy. Especially because they were.
After that? Oh how simple it had all been. He’d found the country ripe for something, anything besides the deadlock and uselessness that the slavery debate had started. And they’d found it in George Law.
The biography he’d paid to be written sold well, everyone liked the story of a self-made man from nowhere, gone to Troy and then New York and made good. They liked his attacks on the elites of Washington, regardless of if they were part of the moribund Whigs, corrupt Democrats or black Republicans. And, well the up and coming movement in the country, good patriotic citizens who might not have been the best educated but knew, at least, when something was wrong with the country on a core level, they’d loved him too. They loved him, and were pleased no small amount that there was finally a voice on the national stage that was willing to shout honest truths, willing to say “No!” to rule by Rome.
It had been easy to turn himself into a brand. Even easier when he’d moved from shipping and railways to the news. Desperate editors would say anything to keep their jobs and fund their presses when he was writing the checks. He just had to talk about the right issues, and ignore the others. How easy was that? To say nothing on the dirty business of slavery? Far easier than trying to worm his way to one stance or the other in a weak attempt to appease one side or the other like Pierce or the Republicans did, dividing the country more and more in the process.
In 1855 the Pennsylvania legislature endorsed his run for President at the head of the now unifying American Party. The southern parties were quick to follow. The only opposition? That weak, cowardly failure Fillmore, promising to make good as the American nominee what he had failed so terribly at doing while President before, and the last nominee of the Whigs in 1852. The challenge a joke, the nomination had been a cakewalk, and with Andrew Jackson’s namesake and nephew at his side, Law had jumped right into the election.
McLean with the Republicans, a tired old waste of a judge and Buchanan a cowardly, snivelling careerist had been horrified as he eschewed their pathetic traditions and led the campaign of a successful businessmen.
Who would speak for Law? Law of course.
While they stayed in Washington DC, cut off from the rest of the country and its realities, he’d crossed the nation by Steamship, Train and Steamboat. cris-crossing the North, the South and the near West he’d talked repeatedly about the dangers inherent in the division of the country. How the old colonial powers of Southern Europe would join the German, Irish and Jewish hordes descending on America’s ports in draping all of the New World in the slavish Pope-worship of old, and crush the already broken democracy of the Republic. And how their agents, the elites of Washington City would already not lift a finger, devoted as they were to the drunken mobs of unemployed, foreign Tammany voters that cheated their way onto the voting roles.
It has worked. Or mostly worked. Yes, if he admitted it he hadn’t quite won the election in 1856, but it had hardly mattered.
California, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, and Tennessee had been enough. The electoral college in deadlock he had gone and done what tired old radical, fringe-party-jumping, activist Supreme Court holdouts and capital insiders without conviction could never have done.
He made the deals. The southerners knew what he was planning and dreamed of seeing the completion of their hero Polk’s vision. And enough northerners were aware enough of the growing problems developing in the cities and though they couldn’t admit it too often, agreed on the solutions.
Patronage had been handed out. Investments had been made. He hadn’t created corrupt bargains but obviously brilliant deals. And so it was that in the spring of 1857 he had become President.
Everything had been so easy before.
But then, once in office things had changed.
For a moment he was out of the past, back in the hot summer of 1864. Somewhere off in the north, the occasional shot of a rifled musket, and the alarm bells were being replaced by something more ominous. Major General Sanford, NYSM was on the scene obviously, as the deeper blasts of cannon and the cacophony of entire companies firing at once, forced itself to echo over the twilight air.
The War with Spain had been easy enough to start. And at first popular enough.
He’d refused to allow organized foreign units. There were no New York Italian regiments or Irish brigades, he’d allowed the Highlanders to serve obviously though, that had been different, but those unwashed, drunken, incest-mad mobs had been taken in anyway, so long as they were scattered in the other units each state had offered.
He had though seen the raising of thousands of volunteers, had seen the navy commission and charter hundreds of ships. Had seen contracts sent out to fortify the cities of the coast from the black Armada’s horrors.
But there’d been trouble. the campaign in Eastern Cuba for Santiago had been a bloody sog. With many, many times more men killed by Yellow Fever and Malaria than the Spaniards.
And when the landings around Havana and on the island of Porto Rico had begun things had taken a far more troublesome turn.
Massachusetts had quit the war first, with Governor Banks refusing to send even a regiment more for service until a law had been passed demanding either independence for the islands, or that they be turned into Free Territories, regardless of how many slaves the Spanish already had on the island.
That in turn had become a problem when the Supreme Court finally ruled on a decision, on sectional lines, six to nine that some damned negro had no standing in the court and that there was no such thing as a “Free Territory” anyway. In peacetime it would have been trouble. In the middle of a war with Spain it had been a disaster for Law.
Recruitment in New England, so promoted by his Secretary of War dried up. Massachusetts was joined by Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Michigan in refusing to deploy transport troops to the embarkation ports.
The South had cried bloody murder. Jefferson Davis, one time Secretary of War and now serving as a Corps Commander in the lines outside of Havana wrote a letter published in every Southern paper calling for Martial Law in Boston. They hollered ‘till they were hoarse about “A Second Hartford.” All the while Republican Senators screamed of the Knights of the Golden Circle, war for Empire, and Slave Power.
He had tried to force a compromise. Offered Federal grants for railroads. Offered to bring in New Mexico as a Slave state on one hand and offered to bring in Kansas as once as a Free State --- the bloody mess of that territory having been a problem to ignore from day one, as Pierce had before him--- called for constitutional amendments to draw a line across the country for Slavery. But none of it worked. They had all been too devoted to their damned ideals and principles.
Eventually the lines around Havana broke. Eventually the US fleet and the Spanish relief fleet bound for San Juan met in the Leeward Islands. Albert Sidney Johnston and David Dixon Porter were the heros of the war on land and sea, praised throughout the country.
1858 was the first year in American History that a sitting President left the country, as he headed to Paris to sign the Peace Treaty, the annexation of the two colonies being the core of the agreement hammered out by Secretary of State Rives. Feasts with Napoleon III and Festivals at the Crystal Palace in London with Queen Victoria had followed, as well as the honor of the first transmission sent on the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph. “The European Jaunt” had seemed like a victory triumph.
But much as the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph eventually failed, so too did the festivities.
On the returning to the United States the 1858 Midterms proved to be a disaster. There was no victory boost to see an American majority in the Congress. But there was a Republican one. The Democrats split, with Stephen A. Douglas, the northern party leader coming out for Free Soil, having seen which way the wind was blowing, and Independence for Cuba. What Americans were left seemed to defect to the “Anti-Cuba Democrats” or the Republicans.
In the South things hardened as well. Many an American Party candidate found themselves, if not an outright defector like Governor Richard Taylor, leasing their votes out to Howell Cobb. Allies in the Democrats like Andrew Johnson were in turn rapidly forced to turn their anti-establishment stances in a less Pro-Law direction.
Kansas continued to bleed. The Pro-Slavery government in Cuba under Governor Walker in turn started to burn. John Brown invaded the US Arsenal at Guantanamo Bay and headed into the Mountains, leading a simmering slave revolt that was still going on today, though now it branded itself the “Unionist Insurgency”, and in a somersault over the facts, sat two United States Senators.
The economy had tanked too in the post-war economic cool down. George Law lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many others lost more. It was in an era of deprivation the Republicans had begun investigations into “questionable” contracts in the war. As if a President didn’t have the rights of Patronage. Or wasn’t expected to have the good sense to agree to federal purchases with men he knew and trusted.
It had all been a bloody shambles. His Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Broom was still in Prison. Most of the cabinet had been forced out. The Tenure of Office Act they had passed in the aftermath not only forced him to accept a cabinet of failures, lawyers and politicians, but had set him up for Impeachment if he challenged what the Senate found to be “Acceptable Appointments”. It had also for that matter, forced Samuel Hinks out of a job when it disbanded his Department of Americanization.
And then had come the election of 1860. For a while Law thought that he could buy his re-election. With enough money spent, with enough fair and balanced press coverage secured, he’d be able to overcome his enemies plotting in the shadows. There was no chance for a Democratic reunion, and against three regional parties, the American Party, as the only cross-regional bloc would be able to make leaps and bounds and gain a majority at last.
But then Douglas had bowed out, and thrown his support behind the Republicans and their nominee, one of the heros of the Mexican and Spanish Wars, Commodore Stockton on a platform calling for the ban of Slavery only in the territories, and a system of industrialization.
And then Southern Americans had bolted from the party, and simply nominated the Southern Democratic ticket of Jefferson Davis and New England War Hero and Congressmen Ben Butler.
It was still a regional fight though, and Law was certain, absolutely certain that he could win with a national party, one with the loyalty of the servicemen of the late war, whom he had helped secure a great victory for the nation.
Instead the American Party renamed itself, “The National Union”, and he found himself cut at the knees, the national conglomerate he had created turning on him, tossing him out, declaring his administration and ideals to be “Bankrupted”. They’d abandoned him, and gone ahead and nominated that old career politician Edward Bates on a platform of political compromise and, though they didn’t say it the return to the Washington Elites.
He’d raged.
He’d formed his own party, The People’s Party. He had wrangled Sam Houston into being his running mate.
He hadn’t won a single state. When at least Bates could say he carried Missouri and Maryland.
Stockton became President-elect. Lincoln his junior partner.
And then South Carolina seceded. Followed by Cuba, in an act of treachery that Law still couldn’t forgive. Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. They had declared themselves to be “The Confederate States of America”, they had picked Howell Cobb to go from being their unofficial leader in the Union, to their unofficial leader outside of it. And they had laid siege to Fort Pickens at the mouth of Pensacola Harbor. The Commander of the Fort, a Major Delafield, refused to surrender like his counterparts in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina.
Instead he had spiked the guns the other forts and burned their Cuba-bound supplies in the Harbor and holed up in the easiest to most defensible position.
Law was of the mind that secession was illegal but refused to act. The country after all had fired him. If they didn’t want him, it was going to be Stockton’s problem to deal with not his. But Federal troops trapped in rebel territory was not something he was allowed to sit on.
And so he had ordered the USS Brooklyn to run the southern guns.
And eventually, the word had come back, from the Southern Press first about how that had gone.
The cruiser, burning and tattered, blood across its decks, had failed to make the supply run. It had failed to get out of the harbor for that matter. Commander Walker and his men taken as prisoners of war. Major Delafields starving men forced to watch helplessly.
The Bonnie Blue Flag waved over what eventually became the CSS South Carolina by the end of that day. A final humiliation for the Law administration.
And then the agony was over. Or, more accurately, he simply walked away from the agony, spending his days talking to his New York bankers, planning a retirement of wealth, and walking through the halls of the rotting White House.
He had stood by angrily as Stockton assumed the office, and then left Washington, disinterested in the fall of the city he was sure to follow. He was wrong on that too. And wrong on how long the war would take, as neither Stockton or Cobb proved to be interested at all in his offers for meditating negotiation, refusing to even allow themselves to think like businessmen, refusing to leave their little insider government bubbles.
And so he’d spent the past few years in New York, mostly hated. Refused membership to most clubs, a pariah as his political movement finally died out, not welcomed by companies seeking Federal contracts. He had become old and useless, notable only for the occasional interview with a reporter where he spoke straight truths and was attacked for it.
Outside the Draft Riot raged on. The echoes of battle somewhere uptown not coming any closer. The city still burned. A speech he had given a few weeks ago at a small rally was going to do him no good he was sure, with his denunciation of the Republican administration, and his calls for, as he had always called for “The cutting of a deal”. They will remember you for that most of all. Governor Sickles will see you tried for it. They’ll say you incited this.
Eventually he turned from the window, and put his revolver back in the drawer. There would most likely be no more mobs coming this way tonight. But as he headed for bed, and the alarms kept ringing another thought entered his head.
They may not say anything at all. Because no one cares, and no one will long remember anything you’ve ever done.
And with that, his failures overtook him.
