CHAPTER THIRTY

Rally ‘Round the Flag

Adam rapped on the door jamb of the cubicle at the far end of the hall.  “Mr. Porter?  Mr. Bracebridge requests that all associates meet with him in the main room at 11:30.”  When Porter acknowledged the message with a nod, Adam headed back up the hallway and made his way over to Bert’s drawing table.  “Any idea what the grand gathering is about?” he whispered.

“No,” Bert whispered back, “but I should have a ringside seat.”

Deciding to create the same advantage for himself, Adam began to examine the drawing his friend was working on, and although Bert quickly realized what Adam was up to, he only grinned and let his friend pretend that the simple drawing really required such close scrutiny.

Neither of them needed to resort to subterfuge.  At promptly 11:30 Mr. Bracebridge exited his private office and told the other associates to gather around.  “Mr. Morganstern, Mr. Cartwright, this concerns you, as well,” he called when the two youngest members of the firm failed to respond.  Both hurried over and bent eager ears.

“I’m sure that most, if not all of you, are aware of the grand rally at Union Square this afternoon,” Mr. Bracebridge began.  “As businesses have been requested to close, in order that their employees may attend, this office will close today at 2:30.  Whether you attend the rally or not is, of course, your own choice, and that decision will, in no way, affect your position here.”  He smiled slightly.  “Unless, of course, you allow yourself to be recruited.”  Some light laughter meeting his mild jest, he sobered then.  “I do not make light of that most serious decision.  Should you elect to serve your country, we will certainly regret your temporary loss to our firm, but will keep you in our prayers and assure you of a place here, once you have completed your enlistment.  I would urge you only not to be swayed by rhetoric, but to make your decision, whatever it is, for sound and solid reasons.”  He smiled again.  “That is the type of young men we hire, so I have every confidence that you will do what is right—for yourself, your country and, least in importance, for this firm.  Now, take an early lunch, get back as quickly as you can and accomplish what you can in the time remaining.”

Bert and Adam let the associates leave first; then they took their hats and headed out.  “Where to?” Bert asked.

“Anywhere close,” Adam said.

“Old Tom’s, then?”

Adam shrugged.   Having been in town for less than a week, he was scarcely an expert on the culinary opportunities of New York City.  “I just don’t want to be gone long.  I feel as if I’ve hardly worked a full day since I started!”

Bert slapped him on the back.  “You really must learn to stop looking gift horses in the mouth, Adam.”

“I suppose,” Adam conceded with a wry twist to his mouth.

“Old Tom’s is close,” Bert assured him.  “Just over on Thames.”

Adam tried to place the street, failed and then just followed in Bert’s wake.

Within a few minutes they were walking across the sawdust-strewn floors and searching for a table in the cramped and crowded dining room.  Bert found a spot and motioned toward it, while the more agile Adam hurried forward to claim the table.  “Colorful,” Adam, gazing at the cobwebs hanging from the low ceiling, observed dryly after they sat down.

“The food’s good,” Bert said.

Adam nodded.  “Don’t worry.  I’ve seen this sort of ‘décor’ before.  There’s a place in San Francisco called the Cobweb Palace.”

“And is its food good?” Bert asked.

Adam laughed.  “It’s more concerned with liquid refreshment.”

“Oh,” Bert said.  “Well, I’m going to have the mixed grill, and I’d recommend it.”

Adam glanced up at the chalkboard menu and discovered that the mixed grill consisted of a chop, kidney, sausage and strip of bacon.  “I’m not that hungry,” he said.  “What’s a Welsh slip?  Anything like rarebit?”

“Same thing,” Bert replied, “except it’s served over mince or apple pie.”

Adam arched an eyebrow and then lowered it.  Golden Buck had been good, so maybe this new combination would be, too.  “I’ll have that,” he decided.

“Surely not just that,” Bert protested.

“I’m not very hungry,” Adam said.  He’d lost whatever appetite he’d had the minute he heard that the office would be closed for the Union rally, an event he would much have preferred to avoid.  For that matter, he hadn’t had much appetite since reading the notice in yesterday’s newspaper that the government was considering a reduction of enlistment time from three years to only one.  He still had no desire to be a soldier, but a single year’s commitment certainly made it more feasible.  Could he justify denying his country that much of his service?  “Did you want to attend the rally?” he asked hesitantly.

“Don’t you?” Bert replied, blinking with surprise.

“If you do,” Adam said quietly.

“Well, I thought I would,” Bert said.  “Not that I intend to enlist,” he hastened to add.  “I mean, I’ve only just started here, and besides that, my mother would never hear of it.  Not that she’s unpatriotic, you understand, but, well, wouldn’t yours be opposed?”

“Probably—if she were living,” Adam said.

“Oh, sorry,” Bert said, abashed.  “Should have remembered that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Adam said.  “At any rate, for me, it would be Pa throwing the fit if I were to enlist—probably one loud enough to be heard here in New York.”

“There you have it, then,” Bert concluded as their plates arrived.  “For us, this will just be an afternoon of fine speeches and a chance to show our support for the troops.”

“All right,” Adam agreed, beginning to relax.  Maybe he didn’t have to serve on the battlefield himself.  Maybe it was enough to support those who did.

Bert cut off a fourth of his sausage and passed it over to Adam’s plate.  “Here.  Get, at least, that much meat into you, my man.”

Mouth full of silky Welsh slip, Adam merely nodded his acceptance of the offering.  His appetite was coming back, and he was beginning to eye Bert’s fuller plate with something akin to envy.

* * * * *

Adam tipped back his hat and swiped the sweat from his brow.  It was another scorcher today, and the low-hanging clouds seemed to do nothing but push the heat earthward.  He and Bert had been lucky to find a place on the streetcar, even though they had to stand for the entire journey.  At least, they had shade for the duration of the brief trip; after that, Adam was pretty sure they’d be cooking under that burning sun.  Though he wasn’t familiar with Union Square, he didn’t think there could possibly be enough shade trees for everyone likely to attend this rally.

They got off at 14^th and Broadway, and Adam’s mouth gaped at the swarm of people crowding into the square.  Far more than had attended the band concert at Central Park.  If he’d had to guess, he would have estimated 20,000 already.

“Good thing we arrived early, eh?” Bert suggested tentatively.

Adam snorted.  “Oh, yeah.  If it’s gonna get worse later on, definitely a good thing we arrived early.  Well, which part of this oven do you want to bake in?”  The gray clouds overhead only wrapped the oppressive heat in a blanket of humidity.

“Oven is right,” Bert said, wiping his brow with his handkerchief.  He pointed toward a platform to their left.  “There, at the Young Man’s stand.  That’s the place.”

Adam snickered.  “Because, otherwise, people might mistake us for old codgers?”

A quick glance around the square showed five such stands, and he saw nothing in particular to recommend this one, but having no objection to it, either, he followed Bert’s lead as he pressed his way through the throng to get as close to the platform as possible.

“We should have a good view from here,” Bert said when he could go no further.

“Of what?” Adam teased.  Personally, he would have preferred a spot on the perimeter of the crowd, so as to make a quick exit if the political speeches became burdensomely boring.

“The Pathfinder!” Bert cried.

“General Frémont?” Adam asked skeptically.

“The very same,” Bert declared.  “Better than just listening to some old politician, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose,” Adam said, though there was no enthusiasm in his voice.  His head was echoing with recollections of what Josiah Edwards had said about how Frémont had managed Missouri when he’d been in charge.

Bert picked up on it immediately.  “You’re not interested in him?” he asked incredulously.  “I thought you would be, him coming from your part of the country.”  His eyes suddenly widened with a new idea.  “Maybe you already know him, though.”

Adam laughed.  “Scarcely.  Kit Carson, yes, but I’ve never met General Frémont.”

Though Adam wouldn’t have thought it possible, Bert’s eyes widened yet more.  “You’ve met Kit Carson?  Now you’re joking!”

“Not at all,” Adam said.  “He was just passing through, but he took supper with us.”

“Supper . . . at your house . . . wow.”  Bert looked completely overwhelmed.  “Wait ‘til they hear about this at the Whitneys’!”

Adam chuckled.  “You impress easily, my friend.”

Bert shook his head.  “First, Governor Nye and now, Kit Carson—those, my friend, are connections.”

Adam doubled a fist and gave Bert a short jab to the shoulder, all he had room for in the crush of the crowd.  “Well, just maybe, in years to come, my greatest claim to fame will be that I once worked alongside that nationally known architect, Bertram L. Morganstern.”  He stroked his chin.  “Of course, I’d be better able to impress people if I could reveal that secret middle name.”

Bert laughed.  “Not on your life!”  They spent the next several minutes with Adam suggesting possible names beginning with “L,” everything from Logan to Lincoln, and Bert trying to distract him by pointing out the red, white and blue bunting and banners festooned from every building in sight.

The rally was scheduled to begin at 4 p.m., but it was fifteen minutes past when the representatives of the Young Men’s Club could finally be seen coming along 14^th Street, with a small police escort.  As General John C. Frémont stepped onto the platform, the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of admiration for the famous man, and even more people pushed into the area fronting Stand No. 5.  Adam tightened his arms into his side to avoid having one of them knocked off.

When he was introduced, Frémont, rosette blossoming on the breast of his uniform, moved to the front of the platform.  He smiled and waved, but no one could hear his first attempts to greet the crowd over their shouts of welcome to him.  Then he raised his voice and began to speak over them.  “It is hardly necessary to say that this grand assemblage has been called to consider the situation of the country, with the object of adopting such measures as will enable you to respond most immediately and effectively to the President’s call for troops.”

Adam moaned, so softly that even Bert could not have heard him over the applause interrupting the speaker’s opening remark.  He’d known, of course, the ultimate purpose of this gathering, but hearing it stated so plainly awakened within him every conflicting thought he’d ever had on the subject of enlistment.  Where did his duty lie, on the battlefield or here, on the home front?

Frémont continued, “But at the same time it is expected that the occasion will be used for such an expression of your feelings and opinions”—more applause interrupted him again—“as will satisfy the country that the enthusiasm which characterized the meeting held here last year, has now become your settled resolve.”  The applause this time was tumultuous, but Frémont forged on, “And that it is not in the ideas or possibilities of the day that you will consent to a dismemberment of your national territory.”

“Never, never,” came a shout from the crowd, while others cried, “Hear, hear.”  Adam joined enthusiastically in the applause this time.  To enlist or not remained a conflict, but there was no question of where his feelings lay—with freedom for all men and with the continuation of the Union.

“The people realize that a decisive struggle, which will tax their utmost energies, is to come,” Frémont declared

“That’s so; hurrah for you,” supporters hollered.

“And that upon the issue of this struggle depends the life of a nation.”

“Indeed, it does,” came the answering cry.

“The South has resolved itself into a great army, to the support of which all its industrial resources are directed,” Frémont continued.

Adam frowned.  What industrial resources did the general mean?  He’d always thought that it was the North that had great industrial resources, while the South’s lay, primarily, in agriculture.  Pondering that, he missed the next few remarks, but focused again on a call to which he knew he should respond.

“You must show your soldiers that they have not only your admiration for their courage and gratitude for the services they have rendered you,” Frémont admonished, “but that they can rely upon your cordial and prompt support.”

Adam recalled, with considerable chagrin, that there was one soldier in particular to whom he should have been extending such support.  A good while back, Pa had written that Mark Wentworth had been transferred back East.   Adam had written his friend one letter, but wrapped up in school and his budding relationship with Elizabeth, he had neglected to maintain that correspondence, as he had that of his other friends.  He’d change that, starting this very night, although it might take some doing to discover where Mark’s unit was currently stationed.

By the time Adam’s attention returned to the platform, Frémont was concluding his opening remarks to thunderous and prolonged applause.  What followed was the most boring part of the afternoon’s program, the recitation of a long list of vice-presidents and secretaries in charge of the meeting.  Once it was over, Frémont, as president of the proceedings, introduced the Reverend Rufus Clark.

The minister made a quip about taking his text from the book of Daniel, quickly explaining that he was referring to Daniel Webster.  He quoted, “Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever” and, taking up Frémont’s theme, pointed to the flag waving above them as the pledge that they would continue to be one and inseparable.  “I remember very early in this struggle,” he continued when the applause died down, “that somewhere down South they had a funeral, they walked in procession and buried that flag, and they supposed that was the last of the American flag.”  His eyes twinkled as he added, “But, gentlemen, I believe in the doctrine of the resurrection.”  Voice rising over the laughter and applause, he said, “And I believe this flag, even over that soil cursed with rebellion today, shall yet rise and float proudly over that State.”

Adam didn’t know what church Reverend Clark presided over, but he thought he wouldn’t have minded sitting through the sermons of a man so adept with a turn of phrase.  The minister enthusiastically pledged to rally the troops until the Confederate capitol of Richmond was taken.  “And if . . . the city is not taken in the course of some weeks or months, I think I shall send my friend, General Frémont, there to help.”  That suggestion was, of course, met with loud cheers from the crowd surrounding the platform.

After citing the Declaration of Independence as a document that advanced the doctrine that all men were free and had the right to follow happiness, he again drew on the general’s popularity.  “I think it very appropriate that the noble man who is with us today, who first put the American flag upon the summit of the Rocky Mountains—the man who gave freedom to California—should be the first to order the bugle-note of emancipation when he was a General in the army.”

That, Adam recalled, was exactly the action that Josiah, though personally committed to abolition, had questioned.  He had said—and Adam agreed with him—that freedom for the slaves was an action to be taken by the President and Congress, not by the authority of a single general, however good-intentioned.  There were those who wanted Frémont to run for President, but Adam wondered whether the man had the judgment necessary to lead the country, especially in time of war.

Reverend Clark was concluding his remarks when Adam pulled out of his reverie, and the crowd responded with three cheers, first for President Lincoln, then for the speaker and finally for General Frémont, who responded by introducing the next speaker, the United States District Attorney.  He presented much the same sort of rhetoric, met with much the same response of cheers and waving hats and handkerchiefs, and then yet another speaker was introduced.

To Adam’s relief, this man merely introduced the Amateur Glee Club, whose rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was joined by almost everyone within sound of its echoes.  The effect of so many voices raised in the national anthem was electrifying, and the crowd seemed eager to comply with the speaker’s urging to respond to the President’s call for volunteers.  “Every southern breeze brings to us the wails and the cries of the wounded, the pleadings of the sick and disabled, and they ask us for aid,” the man declared, and when he ended by reading verses written by a Connecticut volunteer, Adam closed his eyes in misery.  How could he shut out those cries?  How could he not respond to his nation’s need?  Yet how much could one man do when the need was overwhelming?  How much more might he accomplish by preparing himself, as Pa had said months ago, to rebuild their broken country once this dreadful war ended?

The music of a passing band interrupted the tortured questions, and when they’d given the traditional trio of cheers, the Glee Club began to sing “God Speed the Right.”

The next speaker was brief, but blunt, as well.  “Now, fellow citizens,” said Charles Gould, “let us have as the result of this stupendous proceeding, some single practical result.  We want volunteers, we want to end the war, and end it at once.  There is one way to do it.  Take away their laborers from their fields, from their ditches and from their various labors.  Take away that on which they live at home, and the soldiers of the South will be compelled to go home and go to work.”

As others applauded, Adam grimly pursed his lips.  Freedom for the slaves, but only as a means to end the war?  Like any loyal citizen, he wanted the war to end, but if that’s all emancipation meant, it was scarcely worth the price paid in blood and disrupted lives.

Two colonels followed Gould, but Adam scarcely heard what they said over his own roaring thoughts.  The rhetoric was all running together, but when the second officer declared that “it is worse than wrong to forego the advantage” of using the South’s slaves in the service of the Union Army, Adam shouted in outrage, although his voice went unheard among the loud cheers surrounding him and the rumble of thunder.   That was nothing more than exchanging one master for another, and bondage, even to a beneficent master, was nonetheless bondage.  He’d have no part of it!

Mood as dark as the thunderclouds hovering over the park, Adam looked over his shoulder, but quickly saw that there was no escape.  We might as well be sardines in a can, he thought as he faced forward again with a sigh.  Whether he wanted to or not, he was doomed to listen to every word any of these politicians or military men decided to spew.

The next speaker fit into neither category, however, and he was, at least, someone whose name Adam knew.  Who, indeed, had not heard of the editor of the New York Tribune?  True to his newspaper background, Horace Greeley proved that he had the ability to edit his remarks.  “I have been asked, fellow citizen, what is the use of this meeting,” the editor said.  “I answer to tell the Government to go ahead and the people will follow them. . . .  We have been only half at war.  We are henceforth to be fully at war.  And until the last rebel flag goes down in the country we know of but two parties, Unionist and traitors.”  His voice rose as he proclaimed, “That is the message which this meeting sends to our Government, and I rejoice to believe that the Government will hear and heed it.”

The crowd again erupted with cheers, but a sudden gust from the south began to sweep dense columns of dust across Union Square.  The clouds that had been glowering all afternoon turned black as ink as fierce winds whipped them across the sky, along with the flags and bunting decorating the stands and buildings around the Square.  Heavy raindrops began to pelt the crowd, and people scattered in every direction.

“No, this way!” Adam yelled, grabbing Bert by the elbow and propelling him toward the platform.  Since almost everyone else was going the opposite direction, for a few moments they made no progress at all.  Then they burst through the edge of the crowd, and Adam flung himself underneath the scaffolding, with Bert scrambling after him.

“Wow, that came up fast,” Bert panted as they sprawled in the scant shelter and watched the briskly circling dust spouts chase other men from the park.

“Signs earlier,” Adam said, but like Bert, he’d been so caught up in the rally itself that he had ignored what a country boy should have seen coming.  Not that it would have mattered, he reminded himself.  Sardines in a can.

The shower only lasted five minutes or so, but it had effectively put an end to the rally.  It was after six when Adam and Bert headed back to the boardinghouse, hoping that someone had thought to keep a plate warm for them.

* * * * *

Adam posted his letter to Mark the next morning, but the action brought no sense of duty fulfilled.  How had he managed to convince himself, for even one minute, that giving moral support to a single soldier in the field was the same as standing by that soldier’s side?  It didn’t help, either, that Bert had teased him about an article in that morning’s paper.  “Just think, Adam,” his friend had jibed.  “Join up with a Connecticut unit, and your fortune is made!”  He tapped Adam’s arm with the paper.  “Of course, you’ll need a wife, if you want the maximum bonus.  I’m sure one of the Whitney girls would be pleased to oblige.”

Adam had scowled sourly at him.  While an extra six dollars a month wasn’t worth marrying one of those three, the list of bonuses for enlistment might have been enticing if accepting them hadn’t meant giving up the very thing on which he’d have wanted to spend the money, a few more creature comforts at Yale.  Two dollars just for enlisting and then thirty dollars a year from Connecticut, with an advance of fifty if he joined by August 20.  Add to that the twenty-five dollars the national government would pay on enlistment and the seventy-five when honorably discharged, and it certainly enhanced the prospect, if what motivated a man most was money.

Adam would never discount any man’s need for cold, hard cash, but that wasn’t the reason his mind continue to roil with arguments for and against enlistment.  The issue, for him, was the freedom of men just like him, but for the color of their skin, and the preservation of the Union upon which all their freedom was founded.  Some of the rhetoric he had heard the day before had inspired him; some had repulsed him, and late into the night and at every unoccupied moment the next day, the two sides of the debate hammered inside his head.  As the week drew to a close, however, his thoughts turned away from the national conflict, for he had another battle to fight here at home.