New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [217]
As for the issue of slavery itself, wasn’t it best to ignore it for a while? Even in the North, most states still reckoned the black man was inferior. Negroes in New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania might be free, but they couldn’t vote. In 1850, the Fugitive Act had made it a federal crime, even up in Rhode Island or Boston, if you didn’t turn over an escaped slave when his Southern owner claimed him. Such awkward compromises might enrage the moralists and abolitionists, but in Frank Master’s opinion, they were necessary.
And that was the difference between him and Hetty. Frank Master loved his wife for her intelligence and strength of character. She’d been his intellectual partner in everything. He understood that if she believed strongly in something, she couldn’t remain silent, and he was not surprised when she joined the abolitionist cause. But if he could agree with her that the abolitionists were morally right, that did not make them wise.
At first, when she had argued with him, he had tried to smooth things over. But as time passed, she became more passionate. One day, returning from a meeting at which a powerful abolitionist minister had preached, she had even gone down on her knees to him and begged.
“Slavery is an evil, Frank. You know in your heart that it is so. Please join with me—others like you have done so. We cannot let this continue.” For her, the issue was so profound, so much a question of personal morality, that it was impossible not to take a stand. But he could not, and would not.
Gradually, therefore, without desiring it, she had come to think less of her husband. And he, sensing that her respect for him was diminishing, drew somewhat apart. Sometimes they had arguments. It was true, for instance, that a number of merchants and bankers in the city, moved by the moral arguments of the preachers, had become abolitionists. But most had not. New York shipped the cotton, supplied the finance and sold all manner of goods to the slave-owning South. Was he supposed to tell his friends to ruin themselves? Frank asked. They should find other trade, she said.
“Or look at the English,” he pointed out. “They are entirely against slavery, but the cotton mills of England aren’t closing because the cotton’s picked by slaves.”
“Then they are despicable,” she replied. And since these judgments, he supposed, must equally apply to him, Frank felt a mixture of hurt and impatience with his wife.
During the few years, as the relations between the North and South had grown worse, he had refused to be swayed by any of the rhetoric. And when the great dispute had arisen, not over the states, but the territories beyond them, he had insisted on analyzing the question as calmly as if it had been a practical problem of engineering.
“I love railroads,” he’d remarked to Hetty one day, “but it’s really the railroads that have caused all this trouble.” Everyone had agreed that the Midwest needed railroads, and in 1854 the leading men of Chicago had reckoned it was time to build transcontinental lines across the huge, untamed tracts of Kansas and Nebraska. The only problem had been that none of the railroad companies would undertake the investment until Congress organized those wild western lands as proper territories. And it was surely a pity, Frank thought, that after a struggle, Congress had yielded to Southern pressure and granted that slavery should be allowed in these territories. “It’s a foolish decision,” he’d pointed out at the time. “There are hardly any slaves in those territories, and the majority of settlers don’t even want them.” But this was politics, and reality was not the point. In no time, the overheated politics of North and South had taken over.
“The Nebraska Territory reaches right up to the Canadian border,” the North complained. “The Southern slavery men are trying to outflank us.”