Captains and the Kings

  Chapter 28

  Mr. James Spaulding was old but his avidly sympathetic eyes under their heavy lids were as bright and malignant and smiling as ever, and his hair as flagrantly dyed. The rubbery texture of his features-now wrinkled and somewhat collapsed-had become even more mobile and seemed almost in constant motion, with the pursing and pushing out of lips, with the wrinkling of forehead and heavy cheeks and the sniffing and twitching of nose. His ears were larger and pushed out his hair which was now poetically near his shoulders. He affected the long soberly rich coat of Prince Albert, and the striped trousers and the subdued cravat and the big pearl pin, and his boots were narrow and polished. He was very rich, for he not only received a handsome "stipend" from the estate of Mr. Healey, as had been designated in the will, but Joseph was careful to give him gifts also, for, as Mr. Healey had jovially warned him, "You've got to keep on buying your friends, Joe, no matte*/how loyal and true they seem to be. You can buy them with services, but tjiere's no substitute for cash. There's one thing sure: You can't buy them with protestations of love and appreciation and sweet words. No nourishment in them." So Joseph continued to buy Mr. Spaulding and had had no reason to complain of the return in faithfulness and attention to his interests. They did not trust nor like each other, for Mr. Spaulding had also detected the peculiar probity that lay below the immense large rascalities of Joseph's manipulations, and Mr. Spaulding never trusted anyone who was not as great a scoundrel as he was, himself. Joseph had doubled what he had inherited from Mr. Healey and was well on the way to tripling it. "Midas touch," said Mr. Spaulding with admiration. "Luck of the Irish, as Ed used to say. But you've got to have no conscience," he would add with virtue. He now feared Joseph, he who had never feared a man before and this increased both his respect and his dislike. He could not understand why Joseph had not joined the company of voracious and malevolent men who had looted the prostrate South. He also could not understand the hatred Joseph felt for Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, ruler of the Republican House of Representatives, and once a vicious enemy of the conciliatory and grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln who had only desired the healing of fratricidal wounds. It was Stevens who had proclaimed, concerning the beleaguered South:

  "I have never desired bloody punishment to any great extent, but there are punishments quite as appalling and longer remembered than death! They are more advisable, because they will reach a greater number. Strip a proud people of their bloated estates, reduce them to a level with plain Republicans, send them forth to slave labor and teach their children to enter the workshops-and you will thus humble the proud traitors." He advocated that Congress carve up "the damned rebel provinces," and fill them with settlers from the North-"as though," Joseph said, thinking of Ireland, "the whole South were a conquered foreign land." Stevens tried to force Congress to divide up into tiny thirty-five acre farms, the great plantations of the South, and sell them to freedmen at ten dollars an acre. "I should like to see the Southern whites," said Stevens, "be forced to return to their origins in the British Isles! Or perhaps to France." Joseph said to Mr. Spaulding, "He is a low-born dog, and he is full of secret hatred of himself, which is to be expected." But Joseph was also thinking of the Irish estates which had been seized by the English and sold to Scots and Englishmen, and the former owners of the farms driven out, starving, onto the highways and byways with their wives and children and old parents. Mr. Spaulding confessed, himself, that he could not understand the virulence of Stevens, who was one of the foremost in the persecution and attempted impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, who had mildly attempted to carry out the merciful plans of the murdered Lincoln. "I can," said Joseph, who had read Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, and who remembered his conversations with Mr. Montrose. "He hates himself, for he knows what he is, and to escape the effects of this hatred he hates others, particularly those of finer parentage and tradition." He found little to choose between the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx of 1848 and Thaddeus Stevens's convictions. "Though Marx," he would reflect, "came of better blood and breeding." Thaddeus Stevens, in his blood lust, longed for vengeful power over the helpless. Mr. Spaulding remembered that Joseph had come to him and had said, "Find out as much as you can about Stevens, his hidden background, his earlier life, any congress with women, his ambitions, his private affairs." For Stevens, to Joseph, had become the epitome of the English conqueror, without mercy or justice or compassion. Mr. Spaulding had sedulously carried out his mission. No one knew exactly what had happened-not even Joseph himself knew completely- but Stevens, on the very crest of his triumphant hatred, died suddenly on a sweltering August day in 1868 in Washington, and to the last he was voracious and brutal of lip, and Napoleonic in posture. Yet the evil that had lived in him lived after him, and the Radical Acts set up by Radical Republicans in the North almost destroyed the fallen South, and almost mortally divided a precariously united nation.

  It was not the last time that Joseph had put his power for or against a politician. The time had now come, he had decided, to destroy the man he most despised in the world, a man who, though he had not belonged to Stevens's party, had assiduously supported him with a view to loot in the South and had voted with him to impeach President Johnson. Joseph, to increase his power, had become an American citizen. He had arranged a meeting with Mr. Spaulding this warm August day, and he would soon arrive at Mr. Spaulding's offices with his secretary, Timothy Dineen. Mr. Spaulding had often complained to himself that Joseph was "secretive," and did not often ask the advice of wiser and older heads-like Mr. Spaulding's-and bought and manipulated without apparently consulting anyone. So Mr. Spaulding did not know that Joseph had bought vast acreages in Virginia, at a very low price, and had sold them to Mr. Montrose- Clair Devereaux-for an even lower price. There was just a simple notation in Joseph's personal books: Investment in Virginia-large loss. Mr. Spaulding wondered at this, for Joseph was probably the only man who had sustained losses in the South. It was dangerous now, in the North, to be a Democrat, so Joseph had become a Democrat, and when Mr. Spaulding had incredulously protested Joseph had said, "I despise Whigs." To Joseph the whole tragedy of the country had become a conflict between England and Ireland. Had this been pointed out to him by an astute philosopher he would have jeered with derisive laughter, for, as he frequently said, he had no allegiances, no country he loved, and all nations were for exploitation. Only Mr. Healey would have known and understood. Mr. Spaulding knew all the villainies of men, but little of the deep and passionate and subterranean origin of their motives. So, as Mr. Spaulding awaited the arrival of his client, he read last night's editions of the Philadelphia Messenger, the largest newspaper in Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Messenger pointed out, with pride, that it was Mr. Joseph Armagh who had investigated young Jay Gould-"the audacious Wall Street financier"-and had brought to the attention of President Grant that Mr. Gould had "cornered the fifteen million dollars in gold in the nation, in circulation, and had thus forced up its price." Mr. Armagh had also informed the President that it was the President's own brother-in-law who had been the Spy in the White House, and in Washington, and had so conspired with Mr. Gould. As a result of this manipulation the whole country's currency had been shaken, and the whole financial structure. "But Mr. Armagh's enlightenment of the President caused the Treasury to move in and sell government gold, thus saving the country, which might have been ruined." Unfortunately, the paper continued, Mr. Gould's government contacts informed him in time, and he sold at once-at an enormous profit. Other plotters, less in touch with Washington, fell into bankruptcy. "Are the bankers our rulers, or are our elected officials?" demanded the newspaper in wrath. Joseph, on reading this, had laughed out loud and with contempt at such naivete His banker friends, whom he frequently met in New York, and who came from other countries to meet with him, had given him the information concerning Jay Gould. "For," as they said, "America is not prosperous enough for looting as yet. That will come later-we do not know how much later-with the establishment of a
private banking institute in America, which will have the power to coin money, and not Congress: a Federal Reserve System. This can come only in the form of an amendment to your Constitution." It was only in New York City, these past few years, and in some other Northern cities of the New England States-notably Massachusetts- where it was completely safe to be a Democrat. And the Democrats, being only human, found looting quite easy for men of no conscience and inspired only by greed and the lust for power. In theft and rapacity they made even the Radical Republicans look like country shopkeepers. In two years alone the organization of William M. Tweed and a few others of his Tammany conspirators stole seventy-five million dollars from the depressed city of New York, and their total thievery from 1865 to 1871 was estimated by investigators to be in the neighborhood of two hundred millions. Tweed threatened contractors doing business with New York so efficiently that they added one hundred percent to their bills to the city, and returned the overcharge to the Tweed Ring. As a result, in one case alone, New York paid nearly two million dollars for plastering one lone city building, and over a million and a half for some thirty-five tables and chairs. Tweed, of course, was a director of the Erie Railroad, together with one Fisk and Jay Gould, and suborned politicians and judges and even many in the legislature. This was done with such aplomb, such grace and geniality, such loving laughter, that the miserable inhabitants of New York felt only love for their exploiters, and even adoration, for did these not, close to Election Day, supply them with bread and food and money and beer and whiskey and coal and other gifts for their votes? The fact that if the Tweed Ring had not robbed them in the first place they could have bought these things, and more, for themselves, never entered their simple minds, or, if some man pointed this fact out to them they became infuriated. Once Joseph had read, "If the people are robbed, oppressed and exploited, if they are driven to wars and calamities and panics and destitution, they, themselves, are the guilty, for they are stupid beyond imagining and look no further than their voracious bellies." An informed electorate, who would elect only just men no matter their ; financial power or lack of it, was an impossible dream. Mankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors. Joseph did not intend to be a savior of America, and he often found himself thinking, "The lumpen proletariat, which has no reason for existing at all!" It was with a sort of brutal vengeance, then, that he had, as director of two railroads, approved the most appalling retaliations on the Molly Maguires, the desperate and striking Irish railroad workers in Pennsylvania. If the Molly Maguires did not murder and fight as violently as did their oppressors, if they, the Irish, succumbed merely for food, then they deserved what they received. I found a way, thought Joseph. Let them find a way, too. For this reason he had not entirely detested the Tweed Ring. They were Irish who had refused to remain despised and destitute, and had looted as they had been looted. He had informed on Jay Gould and his fellow conspirators not because he, himself, found them reprehensible but because they had threatened his own profits. But the Philadelphia Messenger and the Pittsburgh newspapers fawned on Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh, and imputed to him the most immaculate motives and patriotism-"though he had been born in Ireland"-and wondered aloud why he had not sought public office for himself, "for the sake of his adopted country."

  (The newspapers quoted a member of the President's Cabinet who had said, with rage, "You can't use tact with a congressman! They are all thieves and open to bribery, as we all know. You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" The people, of course, had not listened.) Joseph had smiled darkly when he had read these effusions the night before he came for consultation with Mr. Spaulding. He, himself, had been among the bribers of eager congressmen for the sake of his railroads. (A railroad construction company, Credit Mobilier, had stolen twenty-four million dollars from the U. S. Treasury, and this had been accomplished with the aid of a congressman. The congressman had suborned his own colleagues in Congress by giving them free stock in several railroads, which paid over six hundred percent in dividends a year.) Public office was not for Joseph Armagh. It was more profitable to manipulate the government from outside rather from within. He was to teach his son, Rory, this most salient fact. "The American people beg to be seduced," he told Rory. "Why should we refuse their love? This is as true in your day as it was in mine." When Rory mentioned that an Irishman, Sheriff James O'Brien, had taken the Tweed Ring's secret accounts to the New York Times, which published them in 1871, it was the end of the Ring. The Ring, Rory reminded his father, had tried to bribe the intrepid newspaper with five million dollars not to publish the accounts, but had failed. The newspaper had aroused the desperate New Yorkers and Tweed was put in prison. (Tweed later escaped to Spain, in the guise of a sailor, but even there the newspaper followed him and this resulted in his identification and arrest. He died in a New York prison in 1878.) Joseph then said to his son, Rory: "We must, of course, always remember the Fourth Estate, as Edmund Burke called the press. I admit that if they, together, ever exposed the government and its thieves-and us-that would be the end. But we have ways of suborning and buying the press, too. Not all of them, certainly, but a number. For we can buy newspapers, and publish what we will." He laughed and said, "Rory, you have probably observed that the newspapers often speak of 'a changing world.' But the world never changes. It is always the same-the eater and the eaten. As your Church told you when you were a child, it is Original Sin, and thank God for it. It has made us rich and powerful." He thought of the Panic of 1873-76, which had, by forcing out small railroaders, made vast fortunes for the Vanderbilts-and himself. On this hot and golden, dry and rustling August day, Mr. Spaulding read the laudatory effusions of the newspapers concerning Joseph Armagh, and smiled downwards and rubbed his oily and elastic nose, and waited for his client. He wondered how much Joseph would give him this time, and for what. Joseph arrived with Timothy Dineen before noon, fqr he had been out in the oil fields since early morning accompanied by his manager, Harry Zeff. (The Armagh Enterprises now had impressive offices in Philadelphia, and that city was Harry's headquarters, and his assistants were the younger men who had been Mr. Healey's "associates," plus clerks and lawyers to the number of over two hundred.) Mr. Spaulding was all love and heartiness on greeting the young man, and full of solicitude and little tender cries and congratulations. He patted and plucked, though he knew very well that Joseph detested intimacies or even the touch of others. "Sit down, dear boy, do!" exclaimed Mr. Spaulding. He ignored Timothy who abhorred him. Joseph sat down in a deep red leather chair and Timothy stood near him as though guarding him, his black eyes studying Mr. Spaulding as if he expected him to produce a knife or another lethal instrument. "Brandy, Joe? Whiskey? Wine? I have them all!" "Nothing," said Joseph. He looked worn yet more potent than ever, and his leanness had increased rather than diminished with his prosperity. He had learned not to despise fine clothing, and his long coat and trousers of black silky broadcloth were expertly tailored if not magnificent, and his vest was not embroidered and his linen was plain white. His black cravat was thin and tied in a bow rather than folded, and a black pearl held its knot. His boots were elegant, though now dusty from the fields. His russet hair was still thick and vital but it had faded, here and there, to shadows of incipient gray. He was clean-shaven as always, and was not following the fashion for mustaches and beards and heavy sideburns. His face was still bony and taut, almost fleshless, his arched nose thinner than ever, his mouth still a closed blade. But his small blue eyes had gained in fixed power over the years and sometimes glittered between his auburn lashes when he was angry or annoyed. There were only a few men who admired the appearance of Joseph Armagh, but women found him fascinating and his cold indifference to the majority only increased their infatuation. Mr. Spaulding cleared his throat and glanced at Timothy. "Mr. Dineen?" "Whiskey," said Timothy. His short strong body was broad now with good living, but his muscles were firm and active and his black hair was abundant and carefully waved. "Whiskey it is!" cried Mr. Spaulding in delight,
as if Timothy had given him extraordinary pleasure. "What a warm day it is, to be sure. Yes, in- deedy. We expect cooler days at this time in August." He smiled expansively and lovingly as he poured whiskey and soda into a tall glass for Timothy, and extended it to him, making a leg, thought Timothy who took the glass without an expression of thanks. Mr. Spaulding sat down and beamed at Joseph. "I have been reading all about you in the papers, dear boy! 'Amazing entrepreneur! Associate of the great New York Wall Street Financier, Mr. Jay Regan-the Goulds -the Fisks! Proud that he is a citizen of this mighty Commonwealth! Railroads, mining, oil, milling, building, financial baron!'" "Not to mention my brothels," said Joseph, "nor my rum-running from the South into my Northern distilleries." Mr. Spaulding held up tender palms. "They are services deeply appreciated if not publicly approved," he chuckled. "Do you not serve humanity intimately as well as industrially and financially? This is not to be deplored, no matter the blue noses." "Nor my gun-running here and there, in Mexico and abroad," said Joseph, as if Mr. Spaulding had not spoken. The older man chuckled again, but now his eyes were wary. Joseph was baiting him. He said, "We must make a living at anything that comes to our hands." "Such as looting the South of its cotton," said Joseph. "Well, I was not guilty of that." Mr. Spaulding sighed. "I didn't make an enormous profit, Joseph, though others did. It was enough, but not enormous. Besides, had I anything to do with Reconstruction? No." Joseph said, "Harry Zeff tells me your recent reports to him are well in order. I haven't much time. I am taking the two o'clock to Winfield. I have a mission for you." He paused. He did not move even a finger, yet he gave the appearance of ruthless quickening. "I want you to send me, post haste, a full report on Governor Tom Hennessey.